www.NewVentures.ca

Well I finally solved the puzzle of installing Ubuntu 8.04 within a dual boot environment alongside an already installed Windows installation. Unfortunately, the website I found the information on is lost within the Internet somewhere.

It was during one of my many Google searches for the dual boot solution (recalling the problem as mentioned in my previous posting ) that I came across a very simple and well written explanation on how to make it work. Unfortunately I did not write it down, nor did I bookmark the page, and so I cannot give credit to the real savior of my sanity. But if I ever do come across it again, I will put his credit here ->

The solution was unbelievably simple, albeit not what I expected. Basically ignore, or perhaps better worded “avoid”, any of the guided or semi guided automatic partitioning choices during installation, and choose manual. Make your manual installation as such:

1. Make your first partition at 50 to 100MB in size and when asked where to mount it choose /boot
2. Make your second partition all the disk save for the amount of space needed for your swap space and choose the mount point of /
3. Create a swap space with the last portion. Swap space should be, on average, 3-4 times the size of your computers memory .

That’s it, let the computer do the rest of the install as usual, answering any prompts where necessary and as desired. When the Grub installer asks for the installation location go with its’ default (hd0).

On reboot you will be prompted to remove the installation disk and hit enter. Your Grub menu will pop up offering you several options from an Ubuntu rescue environment to your Windows environment. All worked without a hitch…

I experimented with this scenario several times, building a boot environment both on my original new partition and on my older 160GB disk. All installed and executed without fail.

There is obviously an error in the automatic partitioning process of Ubuntu 8.04’s installation procedures. I am not sure it the problem pertained to my particular configuration or just an oddity that occurs from time to time. Probably, the later as I did not find, save for that one saving web page, any references anywhere else to fixing what I thought was a Grub boot problem by doing a manual install.

So there you have it, all is well with the computer running much better with more disk space in Windows and extremely fast and flexible when it runs Ubuntu. Can’t wait to see what the next challenge will be… till then….