Dual-Booting Blues

// December 29th, 2008 // Technology

Recently upgraded the RAM in my desktop from 1GB to 4GB (what a difference, seriously!)

As such, I also upgraded to Windows Vista, both to give it a try and to start from a ‘clean slate’ as my XP install had become littered with various throwaway one-time-use programs, bogging it down. In addition to Vista x64 I also wanted to install the latest stable Ubuntu Linux build, 8.10, a.k.a. Intrepid Ibex. The developers of Ubuntu have taken to giving each of their releases alliterative animal ‘code names’ such as Jaunty Jackalope and Hardy Heron.

It’s been a learning experience, to put it simply. I’ve installed and reinstalled Vista and Ubuntu a few times now, once after messing up the Vista Boot Loader (which is a much bigger pain to edit, compared to the old XP boot.ini file) another time I didn’t properly set up my harddrive partitions and unintentionally overwrote my already set-up Vista install (which means reinstalling my apps like World of Warcraft, all of my Valve games via Steam, etc.)

This morning I’ve done a bit more research on dual-booting, and found some really handy instructions, which I’ll link at the end of the post. Hopefully this evening I’ll be able to get it all straightened out. We’ll see.

Resources:

How to dual-boot Vista and Ubuntu - courtesy of apcmag.com

EasyBCD – highly rated program for simplifying the Vista Boot Loader’s compatibility with Ubuntu.

danblog