Dual booting Windows XP and Ubuntu 8.04

Posted on March 13, 2009. Filed under: Linux | Tags: DVD, Hard disk drive, Linux, Live CD, Microsoft Windows, Operating system, Ubuntu, Windows XP |

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I was in Bournemouth over the weekend, dual booting my daughters’ rig. The plan was to have both Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux hardy Heron 8.04 on a 250gig hard drive. Like most students, she was not the best when it comes to keeping her machine up to date and a recent remote session had lead to five hours of disk defragging, registry cleaning and general spring cleaning.

When it comes to partitioning, XP has very few built in tools and anyone planning to work on the drive would do well to get hold of a custom paritioning tool. I settled on Gparted Live, a useful utility on a Live CD. Insert the CD boot the rig and Gparted boots to RAM; offering a handy selection of partitioning tools. I hived off 50gigs for the new drive and then installed Ubuntu. Hardy Heron is pretty good on dual instals and will recognise the existence of your Windows partition and offer to migrate your documents over to the new install.

Earlier versions of Ubuntu don’t have support for NTFS. (There is a later version 8.10 and Ubuntu release twice a year on a six month cycle but traditionally only the April (04) version is LTS – Long term support. The October (10) version will often have bugs and other problems which will be resolved by the Ubuntu community by the time of the next April release.) XP does not play nice with other operating systems. It will expect itself to be installed at the beginning of the hard drive, when dual booting, you save yourself a lot of bother and editing if you install XP first. Take some time to understand what you are doing – accepting all Ubuntu’s defaults during an install will probably delete your Windows partition.

Recently, in a well known computer magazine an angry reader complained that a dual install had trashed his windows install, it soon became obvious this person had read the dos and don’ts and focused entirely on the don’ts. In his desire to install Linux he had completely reformatted his hard drive including the hidden partition with restore files! Use Gparted to have a look at the hard drive before you start. Spend some time understanding what you are doing and you could have Ubuntu up and running in an hour, including partitioning time. Hardy Heron includes support for NTFS, so once you have installed you’ll be able to see your Windows partition and access your files (“Places” then look for Media) I find this a big plus since the migration tool may not pull in all the files depending on where they have been filed. It will also see your USB hard drives and network shares.

If you are running a standard Live CD, you’ll need access to the internet and need to download updates and additional software for DVD playing, MP3s and any graphics card you may have. This can be time consuming and bad news if you are on a limited download allowance. I get round this by having a customised DVD version ready to install with everything you need to get you up and running including support for MP3, the social networking browser Flock other goodies.. These are available from me for £2.50 including post and packaging. Good luck with partitioning if you need advice or the Linux DVD drop me an email Click here