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From: Colin Brough on 25 Oct 2007 19:06
I recently was given a new Dell Inspiron 6400/E1505 laptop. It came
with Vista pre-installed on its 55 or so Gb disk. I want to be able to
dual boot with Ubuntu, and have 7.10 to hand...

The machine came with several partitions:

- Dell Utility as first partition, 94M, mountable as vfat (think FAT16)

- Recovery as second partition, about 15Gb, NTFS

- OS as third partition, bootable flag under gparted, most of the
rest of the disk, NTFS; this contains Vista, and is C:\ once booted
into Vista.

These three were all primary partitions.

There then followed a small fourth primary partition (2Gb) with a
couple of scraps of unallocated space and a just under 2Gb logical
partition, mountable as vfat (think FAT32).

Using the latest gparted live CD I first of all successfully shrank
and moved the Recovery partition, reclaiming a little bit of unused
space. After doing this I was able to boot into Vista again, have it
successfully do a disk check on the tampered with NTFS partition!

Emboldened (made rash?) by this success I tried the same trick on the
OS partition, shrinking it and moving it down so the unused space on
the disk was now all contiguous. However, at this point Vista fails to
boot - I get a Dell logo, then a blank screen, then a Dell logo, then
a blank screen.... Some Dell diagnostics can be entered into, pressing
some function key combination, which look like they might be what is
on the Dell Utility partition.

What appears to be happening is that the either the Dell Utility
partition or the 2Gb partition at the end of the disk were somehow
involved in the boot process - and perhaps knew where on the disk the
OS partition was to daisychain on to in the boot process...

OK, so I install Ubuntu 7.10 on all the free space I've created to get
a system I can use up... Ubuntu installs fine.

Questions:

- does anyone know what the Dell specific partitions were doing, what
the boot order was, and how I might go about recreating it;

- is there a good tutorial that might help me learn GRUB to do the
above; I've used LILO for so many years now I'm getting confused by
the terminology in the GRUB documentation!

Cheers

Colin

--

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Colin Brough Colin.Brough(a)blueyonder.invalid
(Replace .invalid with .co.uk to reply)
From: jasee on 26 Oct 2007 04:24
Colin Brough wrote:
> I recently was given a new Dell Inspiron 6400/E1505 laptop. It came
> with Vista pre-installed on its 55 or so Gb disk. I want to be able to
> dual boot with Ubuntu, and have 7.10 to hand...
>
> The machine came with several partitions:
>
> - Dell Utility as first partition, 94M, mountable as vfat (think
> FAT16)
>
> - Recovery as second partition, about 15Gb, NTFS
>
> - OS as third partition, bootable flag under gparted, most of the
> rest of the disk, NTFS; this contains Vista, and is C:\ once booted
> into Vista.
>
> These three were all primary partitions.
>
> There then followed a small fourth primary partition (2Gb) with a
> couple of scraps of unallocated space and a just under 2Gb logical
> partition, mountable as vfat (think FAT32).
>
> Using the latest gparted live CD I first of all successfully shrank
> and moved the Recovery partition, reclaiming a little bit of unused
> space. After doing this I was able to boot into Vista again, have it
> successfully do a disk check on the tampered with NTFS partition!
>
> Emboldened (made rash?) by this success I tried the same trick on the
> OS partition, shrinking it and moving it down so the unused space on
> the disk was now all contiguous. However, at this point Vista fails to
> boot - I get a Dell logo, then a blank screen, then a Dell logo, then
> a blank screen.... Some Dell diagnostics can be entered into, pressing
> some function key combination, which look like they might be what is
> on the Dell Utility partition.
>
> What appears to be happening is that the either the Dell Utility
> partition or the 2Gb partition at the end of the disk were somehow
> involved in the boot process - and perhaps knew where on the disk the
> OS partition was to daisychain on to in the boot process...
>
> OK, so I install Ubuntu 7.10 on all the free space I've created to get
> a system I can use up... Ubuntu installs fine.
>
> Questions:
>
> - does anyone know what the Dell specific partitions were doing, what
> the boot order was, and how I might go about recreating it;

It sounds as if you've altered the partition order. So its not booting from
the right partition. Probably you'd have been able to recover if you'd had a
Vista cd (M$ was/ is? giving them away - I wonder why that was ;-) (no
licence of course but they will still apparently work for 15 days, just
about enoght time to find out why not to use it! ) However you've since
installed grub so that's changed things radically. You might still be able
to recover with a Vista cd and reinstall the grub loader afterwards
I don't think changes in grub now will help you load (yuk!) Vista


From: Colin Brough on 29 Oct 2007 10:54
On Fri, 26 Oct 2007 09:24:50 +0100, jasee wrote:
> Colin Brough wrote:
>> I recently was given a new Dell Inspiron 6400/E1505 laptop. It came
>> with Vista pre-installed on its 55 or so Gb disk. I want to be able to
>> dual boot with Ubuntu, and have 7.10 to hand...

>> [ Snipped tale of how I managed to break Vista's booting ]

>> Questions:
>>
>> - does anyone know what the Dell specific partitions were doing, what
>> the boot order was, and how I might go about recreating it;
>
> It sounds as if you've altered the partition order. So its not booting from
> the right partition. Probably you'd have been able to recover if you'd had a
> Vista cd (M$ was/ is? giving them away - I wonder why that was ;-) (no
> licence of course but they will still apparently work for 15 days, just
> about enoght time to find out why not to use it! ) However you've since
> installed grub so that's changed things radically. You might still be able
> to recover with a Vista cd and reinstall the grub loader afterwards
> I don't think changes in grub now will help you load (yuk!) Vista

Just to follow up on this, I managed to fix things by putting in the
Vista installation and repair DVD that came with the machine, and
selecting the 'repair' option. It fixed whatever was wrong, and didn't
even spoil GRUB...

Cheers

Colin

--

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Colin Brough Colin.Brough(a)blueyonder.invalid
(Replace .invalid with .co.uk to reply)
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