By chance… is your installation of Ubuntu on an encrypted LVM partition? I once had a problem installing Windows on a system that had an encrypted Ubuntu install that I had intended to replace with Windows entirely. But for some reason it would crash the Windows Setup utility very quickly (you made it further than I did though so this might not be the case). I had to use gparted to remove all partitions before Windows setup would load properly. I don’t know why.

Part of me regrets writing this particular blog post because it is a very haphazard task that doesn’t work for everybody and so many different problems can arise. I am sorry for the trouble it has caused you, but on the bright side, your Ubuntu install didn’t crash.

Something you might consider trying is to use gParted (not the one that’s included on the Ubuntu live CD, but the actual gparted stand alone live CD) to size your ext3 root partition down to make space for a new NTFS (or whatever you want really) partition. Then move all the data you need to backup over to that partition…. depending on the hard drive space you have free, you might have to move some data, resize both partitions again (which would take a while), move more data… until you’re done…. but you know what…. this would be a huge waste of time.

To be frank, I wouldn’t waste my time doing this if I were you. You’d be more productive as a McDonalds employee saving money up for a second hard drive to install Windows on to (if HD free space is the issue). I recently upgraded my PC to a new 1 terabyte hard drive for about 80 bucks. Well worth the money.

I would backup my home folder, delete all partitions with gparted, install windows, install Ubuntu after that, then copy the backup of your home folder into your new home folder and work out minor kinks from there. Trust me, you’d spend far less time doing it this way. Less time than that if you were to purchase another hard drive.

Just my opinion.

Can be able to use that on the Raid 5 Disks as well?
I am getting some strange errors.

raj

Love this tutorial.
Everything works fine, until you use for example mrbooter
to choose a OS.

Is there existing a boot program to handle this?

I’ve started a thread about your particular problem on Ubuntu Forums. You are not the first to encounter this problem. View this link for some helpful advice:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=807286

If I’m not mistaken, you are attempting to type “sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst” while in a plain text terminal interface. Gedit is a graphical text editor, so if you are not operating within a GUI, it will not run.

You have two options:

1. Boot from an Ubuntu install CD into a Live CD environment, then run the command from there with the GUI up and running.

2. Use a text mode editor like nano, instead of gedit, to edit the file. If you opt for this option, I would recommend you read a little about using nano from this link:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Nano

Simply exchange the word “nano” for “gedit” in the above command and your config file should open (sudo nano /boot/grub/menu.lst). To save a file after editing, you can hit CTRL-O (which stands for “write out”). Then CTRL-X to quit nano.

Please let me know if you have further problems.

Also, when I tried rebooting I can only get to a command prompt. I tried “startx” and it still will not open to the GUI.

Please help!!

I have a separate drive for XP. It’s a second SATA chained to the master, which is Ubuntu. It boots into Ubuntu fine, and I amended the file once to point to the actual disk with XP on sda1 = (hd0,0)

This didn’t work.

So I looked at the file in more detail and found that Ubuntu is listed as (hd0,0) - so i tried changing the ref to the XP disk to (hd1,0).

This didn’t work either.

Then I thought, well I will change the Ubuntu disk references to (hd1,0) as it’s actually on sdb1,2 and 5.

This gave me a menu of options to choose from (which is what I’m after), unfortunately none of the selections worked.

So I booted from the Live CD and changed the boot back to saying hd0,0 for ubuntu and hd1,0 for xp. I still cant boot into xp (even changing the bios to select that disk doesnt work), but at least ubuntu is working again.

Oh what fun. I have to say after 3 weeks trying to get this … system working properly and reinstate my xp data (stuck in an image file on an external disk - well its on my ubuntu desktop as well), i am beginning to get very bored with the whole thing.

A solution to the problem you’ve encountered can be found here:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=4587202&postcount=9

Error 15: File not found

… what now?!?