Thinkpads Forum

Instead of wiping my 80gb HD and partitioning it half and half with XP and Ubuntu, I figured Id go buy a new big HD and partition it. I got a 250gb and installed XP on it. My XP disc is from 2001, before .NET framework 2.0, before SP2 etc, I installed all that and after a few hours had it the way I wanted it. So I installed Ubuntu on half the partition and it installed fine. When I powered up I got a GRUB error 17. It would not boot into either OS. I held down TAB during boot and saw that there was only 1 partition on the HD when there should have been 3 (including swap).

So after swearing for an hour I tried to reinstall XP and it wouldn't let me, it kept reverting to me to the original install screen. So I returned my new HD and took a hammer and smashed my XP disc. I dont know what went wrong with the install, I did it once before and it worked fine. Im so pist.

Two possibilities come to mind. One is that your partition table got mangled during the Ubuntu install and the WinXP installer was too confused by it to attempt an install. This seems exceedingly unlikely, but anything is possible. The other is that your new hard drive was defective, which seems more likely to me.

Just out of curiousity, how and when did you partition the disk?

Wow, I feel your pain.

Sad thing is that your problem was probably not fixable.

Windows installs sometimes do not write a boot sector correctly if the disk already has one which is why almost all installation procedures advise installing Windows then installing Linux. What happened was probably that Windows overwrote your linux installation, installed a boot sector on the active partition but did not install a boot sector on the drive (which explains the process of always cycling back to the install screen).

If you try again, install Windows first since that might give better results.

interesting, ill keep that stuff in mind.

I just got a new HD that I put XP on (gaming reasons only) and everything works so far. But I have not delt with boot managers yet, so I just unplug the power to my HD if I want to run the other OS. Dumb ya, but it works for now! I keep the side cover off my case anyway because the vid card gets unstable at high temps. Ill get around to doing it the right way tomorrow im sure...just gotta find easy directions..