Can't install windows on new (old) laptop

[swee'pea99]

Just a thought, even if you get the HDD working, 10 Gb is far too small to install MSWin XP.
Is the machine powerful enough to run XP?

Still we have the issue of getting it to boot from HDD or from CD at all. Hmmmm
Assuming you have another machine, and a pack of cheapo CD's you could burn bootables of gparted and clonezilla.
Also with a wee utility called unetbootin you can make USB bootables of these easy as pie.

Try booting to your live Ubuntu key and running the util called GParted. Look at the HDD, you only have one so it does not matter if you make a mistake in this instance.
To do this open a terminal, (from bottom left of the screen if you search apps and put in terminal and start the programme offered)
Type in sudo gparted. You should get a picture a bit like this, but less cluttered than mine:



Post the result here and we'll have a look ..

Ok, I tried the gparted thing and rather to my amazement, it worked! It looks like this:

Any thoughts?

 

[swee'pea99]

I've just been fiddling around with that there gparted, and have discovered that my hard drive is 'not mounted', which googling has confirmed is A Bad Thing if I want it to work properly. Is there an easy way to mount it? (Preferably from ubuntu.) (I've tried googling, but got nowhere fast and it's time for bed zebedee.)

 

[wakou]

If you booted from the live USB, then not mounted is good for what we are doing ATM. I am not a Ubuntist, and it is very late (!!), I will have a think...

 

[wakou]

Hmm could you be in Central Mancville Tomorrow (Saturday) PM between 14:00 and 17:00?
If so, and if I were you, I would drop in here with the lappy:

I don't know the guys but linuxers are usually friendly and very helpful, even if a bit weird (a bit like cyclists, with more hair and beards)

Manlug Meeting October 2011
The Manlug meeting for October 2011 is taking place on 22nd October, details below:

Location: Madlab. (Manchester Digital Laboratory).
Address: 36-40 Edge Street, Manchester. M4 1HN. – (Between Thomas Street and the Craft Centre, opposite A Bar Called Common)”
Date: Saturday, 22nd October 2011
Starts: 14:00
Approximate finish: 17:00

Summary:

There is no particular subject, a general get together and chat. Bring anything to play with, I’d like to get your idea’s on future subjects and a possible change to the time we meet.

Explain that you are new to linux, they will have you running in minutes, I am sure....

(I am trying to contact one of the group (Howard, Sheldon, Leonard, or Raj??) to "introduce" you)

 

[swee'pea99]

That's very kind of you, but unfortunately I'm in London. But many thanks for the thought,.

 

[wakou]

D'oh I thought yr sig meant...........

The palindrome of Bolton would be notloB


You were oop north?

 

[swee'pea99]

D'oh I thought yr sig meant...........

The palindrome of Bolton would be notloB


You were oop north?

Ah, I see! Nope. It's an old Monty Python joke.

 

[wakou]

D'oh, then Prof. A V LeBlanc Phd, founder prof of UManchester dept of Computing and one of the godfathers of linux (wrote the first distro apparently) who kindly sent this :

I won't be there, but I'm sure someone can help; we have a couple of
long standing kernel hackers, including some who've done BIOS programming,
so there should be some help available. It does look like a case of
getting the BIOS settings correct, but it's hard for a newby. We have
some interesting problems here with bios settings on machines being used
in dual boot setups, where windows often doesn't work with this or that
option, even with the default settings on some machines. In this
respect Linux is more flexible.

There was a bug in some BIOSes that meant they didn't recognise a
hard disk as bootable unless it had at least one active partition on
it, which might be something to check.

-- Owen

Will have one less thing to worry about!

(wakou gets the wrong end of stick again...)

 

[MossCommuter]

well, well, well... Madam I'm Adam! I didn't know that; I'd always assumed you'd completely misunderstood palindromes.

there is something worth thinking about in the Doctor Professor's note; can you use gparted to check that the 1st partition on the drive is marked "active". It's worth a try.

A man, a plan, a canal, panama.

 

[swee'pea99]

well, well, well... Madam I'm Adam! I didn't know that; I'd always assumed you'd completely misunderstood palindromes.

there is something worth thinking about in the Doctor Professor's note; can you use gparted to check that the 1st partition on the drive is marked "active". It's worth a try.

A man, a plan, a canal, panama.

A Toyota's a Toyota...


Bob...

 

[swee'pea99]

well, well, well... Madam I'm Adam! I didn't know that; I'd always assumed you'd completely misunderstood palindromes.

there is something worth thinking about in the Doctor Professor's note; can you use gparted to check that the 1st partition on the drive is marked "active". It's worth a try.

A man, a plan, a canal, panama.

I've just been trying to use gparted to find out if the 1st partition is active, and the closest I've got (groping around in the dark) is a message that says, of flags: 'Boot is used by some commercial operating system boot loaders. The boot flag indicates the partition is active or bootable. Only one partition on a disk device can be active.' Now on mine, the first partition is flagged as 'boot'. Does that mean it should work, or explain why it doesn't?

 

[Dragonwight]

In the BIOS your find a setting called LBA ( Logical Block Addressing) it should have two settings normal and other. It will be set to normal switch it to other press F10 and save the settings. Unbuntu should then boot off the hard drive.

 

[swee'pea99]

In the BIOS your find a setting called LBA ( Large Block Access) it should have two settings normal and other. It will be set to normal switch it to other press F10 and save the settings. Unbuntu should then boot off the hard drive.

Hi

Thanks. That sounded really promising and got me all excited. But...

I can't find this ' Large Block Access'.

Am I looking at BIOS? I've always thought it was. The screen that you get if you hit f10 before the booting process kicks in - takes you to a really old dos-style blue screen, with

File Security Tools Advanced

along the top. Is that BIOS? If so, my one at least doesn't seem to have Large Block Access on any menu I can find.

Any suggestions very much appreciated....this feels right...

 

[Dragonwight]

Yes thats the BIOS apologies its Logical Block Addressing, I cant tell you exactly where it is as my old nx6125 is totally dead its either under device security or advanced i think. Although if your goal is to get XP on the machine then this isnt going to help. I had Unbuntu running on the old nx with an IBM travelstar hard drive but it took some doing. If you want XP your best bet is to get an XP installation disk or download the media as an iso from the net and burn it onto a cd make it bootable.

 

[swee'pea99]

Nope - can't find that either *sob*.

Although I'd ideally like to get XP installed, I'd settle for ubuntu booting from the hard drive. The thing that really baffles me is its refusal to boot from a cd. I can hear the thing whirr into action, but after a second or so, it just gives up and stops again.