I was online tonight and after reading a couple of articles and thinking about this for some time now, I have decided to install Ubuntu on my home computer and dual boot it with my XP that lives there now. I should have done this as a play-by-play blog entry but I think after an hour, I can catch you up.
10:15pm-ish: Burned Ubuntu disc onto CD and shut down computer to boot from CD.
10:20pm-ish: After turning on the computer, it boots straight to XP without regard to the disc sitting in its drive. I wonder how this is…
10:22pm-ish: Changed boot.ini file to have just the default info according to Microsoft’s site. Shut down
10:23pm-ish: XP immediately boots up. YAY!!!!! I’m beginning to wonder what’s going on.
10:45pm-ish: After several changes to the boot.ini file followed by several shut downs, I have no clue. Keeps booting directly to XP. There is no stopping it. I add this “/REDIRECT” to my boot.ini and…
10:46pm-ish: Not sure if it was the “/REDIRECT” or me randomly pushing F-keys while the boot happened but I got to the BIOS info. I can’t see anything in there that specifies booting from the CD drive. I’m not an expert in this at all but I thought it was right there. Ended up not doing anything.
11:00pm-ish: More restarts and more XP screens. Starting writing this down now.
11:20pm: Finally found it buried in the BIOS. BTW, if you push F8, F11, F12, and DELETE, one of those opens the BIOS. Good for me to know.
11:24pm: I have seen the Ubuntu install screen. Happiness is here finally.
11:27pm: The OS seems to be loading. I am answering the questions as to where I am and how I want my drive partitioned.
11:29pm: Used default partition and it took about 10 seconds.
11:31pm: I am asked if I would like to import any accounts from my Windows login. This is really cool. I pick my browser settings for IE and FF and move on.
11:33pm: I have to say that this is pretty easy. I get a “Ready to Install” window. Cool.
11:34pm: Official start time. Let’s see how long this actually takes.
11:44pm: Install done and restarting computer. I hope this works.
11:47pm: I am loading Ubuntu now and am very happy that I finally got this to work.
11:50pm: Downloading and installing updates. Everything seems to be working. I can connect to the internet perfectly. This has been a really easy process once I got past the initial “How to boot from a CD” fiasco.
I’ll have more to come once I get a change to bounce around in here.
UPDATE - I got it installed and everything working. I went to check to make sure XP would load correctly and it did perfectly. I did receive a hardware found message that I read I would see. It finished what it needed to do and did a reboot. This is where the trouble started for me. Upon the load, I see a GRUB Error 17 (or something to that matter) on the screen and nothing happens. It just stopped in its tracks. I push the power button to shut it down and start it back up and same thing. It will boot Ubuntu with the disc in but no Windows. I read online that I need to put something called SuperGrubDisk so I go to its site and get an ISO for a bootable disc. Thing is, my Ubuntu CD that I have in the box won’t come out because it’s running the OS currently. So I’ll burn it from another computer and load it tonight when I get home. But as of now, my computer is a nice paper weight.
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