[SOLVED] Repartitioning and installing Windows

[aaron11193]

Hi, I recently decided that I want to run a dual boot of Ubuntu 9.10 (main) and Winblows XP (games).

I made 2 partitions at the end of my disk for installing Windows (20GiB for installation and 1GiB for i386 to install using BartPE). I was reminded by GRUB that my BIOS can't read past 20GiB on my disk (250GB), so I PXE booted parted magic and deleted the ntfs partitions and moved my ext4 partition forward 25GiB to make room for a /grub partition and the two ntfs partitions for Windows.

Anyway I found out that this royally screwed my GRUB2, so I had to boot Ubuntu from the grub rescue> prompt () and do some messing around to get GRUB to boot from the new /grub partition. Now when I try to boot Ubuntu from GRUB2 I have to do it manually because I get a "Cannot read file" error on my initrd.img, funny though it will boot if I do it manually and use the boot command.

Anyone know why this happens? I even made a new initrd.img and pointed to it in the grub.cfg but still get the error..

Also, I PXE booted BartPE and ran winnt32.exe from the i386 folder and did the initial Windows install file copy, ran update-grub in Ubuntu to get GRUB2 to see the Windows install, but when I try to boot it NTLDR gives me a disk read error.

Not having an optical drive in my laptop is such a pain in the ***..

Any help is much appreciated

[OldGrantonian]

I want to run a dual boot of Ubuntu 9.10 (main) and Winblows XP (games).

I had Vista, then I added dual-boot Karmic. Because of the Vista bloat, I removed it and installed XP.

So, just by chance, XP is at the start of the disk, and Karmic at the end. I'm sure I've read that not having Windows at the start of the disk can cause problems.

My only problems were caused by myself when I re-installed Windows. The GRUB menu disappeared, and I had to fix it manually. But that seems to be a well-known issue.

... moved my ext4 partition forward 25GiB to make room for a /grub partition ...

I never had to create a GRUB partition. The Ubuntu install did everything.

So, unfortunately there's no advice in this post. But if you ever need to re-install anything, you might try installing Windows at the start of the disk.
.

[aaron11193]

I can't install XP at the start of the disk because for some strange reason my BIOS can't read past a certain point on my disk and I'm pretty sure that's before 25GiB. So I created a partition for GRUB to get around that stupid limit. Think I'll go back to just Ubuntu, Winblows is too much of a pain in the *** anyway.

[Jonathan183]

Limit could be 1024 cylinder limit which I think is BIOS related. If you are still wanting to setup XP can you post the output of

sudo fdisk -l

.

[aaron11193]

Disk /dev/sda: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0006dbbb

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 3917 30401 212740762+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 * 1 33 265041 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 34 3839 30571695 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda4 3840 3916 618502+ 7 HPFS/NTFS

Partition table entries are not in disk order

GRUB2 is a bit of a pain.. Don't like it very much at all..

[Jonathan183]

I started looking here at grub2 information, it looks quite different from grub legacy - I doubt I will be able to help you as I still have grub legacy on all my systems at the moment. On dual boot systems I have had in the past I think the Windows partition is still marked as bootable (which is not the case from your fdisk output) but I doubt that will cure all your issues.

[aaron11193]

I have actually downgraded from grub2 to grub legacy because I like it more and it's alot more simple.

I worked out why I have to type the boot commands manually too, my kernel is at the start of my Ubuntu partition, which is inside the 1024 cylinder barrier that the dumb Toshiba BIOS can't read past, but my initrd is unreadable by the BIOS so grub throws me an error when I enter the initrd path about the BIOS not being able to read it. Oddly though, the BIOS doesn't need to read it because the kernel reads from it It seems the error message is quite pointless and very inconvenient, even though it is a lot more elaborate that GRUB2's "Cannot read file.".

So screw Windows, I'll just install it on my other laptop HDD and change them when I want to play games or put new music on my iPod ( pretty much all it is good for IMO. )

Thanks anyone that tried to help or contributed to this thread in any way