Install Said 100%, Rebooted to Black DOS Screen

Hi :)

Please can you first try the Ubuntu Cd as a bootable Cd?
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD

Please let us know if the LiveCd works and we can try to help you from there, or else help you to get that working first as you will almost certainly need it later on at some point.

Also i am curious what happens when you choose Windows from that menu, presumably that still works?

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

I am really new to this. Never heard of Ubuntu until today.

I used the Windows Installer. I guess that was there for no reason.

I will try the link you provided. But according to my PC, Ubuntu installed correctly.

And yes, at the dual boot screen I can still pick Windows 7 luckily.

Picking Ubuntu brings up a command lined dos prompt.

So re-installing over itself is a good thing? Ok. I will keep you posted.

Hi :)

The basic problem is that you are trying to run Ubuntu inside Windows. This works fine when Windows is working well, is stable and feels like co-operating with a rival that often replaces it. Even when it does work (surprisingly often due to the clever Wubi developers) it is only meant as a short term demo version.

A much better demo is the LiveCd which depends only on Ubuntu systems and your hardware with no layer of Windows trying to "add something special" into the mix.

Regards from
Tom :)

Hi :)

Ooops, our posts crossed in the wires.

The installer for installing Ubuntu inside Windows does work in about 90% of cases but the LiveCd is a better way to experience Ubuntu first. The LiveCd is only a demo & will forget anything you save to its desktop or "Documents" folder although you can use the "Places" menu to save things to your hard-drive if you really must. The gold&blue firefox icon on the top taskbar should figure out your internet connection and allow you to surf into here :)

I somehow had a funny feeling you were going to say that Windows was fine and had spookily just prevented Ubuntu from working. lol

Regards from
Tom :)

Its actually funny how windows is unable to run such a simple (but
really good!) operating system as Ubuntu 9.10. Oh well I guess you
cannot expect better from Windows. Well, to our problem, this may
sound a "time-taking" process but you should try to install windows in
Ubuntu not the other way around since we all know how 'crappy' windows
really is.

On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 6:58 PM, Tom
<email address hidden> wrote:
> Question #102065 on Ubuntu changed:
> https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/102065
>
> Tom posted a new comment:
> Hi :)
>
> The basic problem is that you are trying to run Ubuntu inside Windows.
> This works fine when Windows is working well, is stable and feels like
> co-operating with a rival that often replaces it. Even when it does work
> (surprisingly often due to the clever Wubi developers) it is only meant
> as a short term demo version.
>
> A much better demo is the LiveCd which depends only on Ubuntu systems
> and your hardware with no layer of Windows trying to "add something
> special" into the mix.
>
> Regards from
> Tom :)
>
> --
> You received this question notification because you are an answer
> contact for Ubuntu.
>

--
Regards,
Sonny Dhillon

Hi :)

Well it is really your choice but i would tend to keep an existing working system until at least after having become familiar with another working system. I see no reason to destroy something that is kinda working or only slightly broken when there is no need to.

Dual-boot keeps both things working and allows people to move over at their own pace or to back-out at any stage if they aren't happy. Trying a LiveCd as a demo checks the hardware at the same time. It's all very neat.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwitchingToUbuntu
is an excellent guide for easing the process. Why bother to make it stressful when it can be gentle?

Regards from
Tom :)

Uncanny. Made and ran the LiveCD and it loaded.

I got to see it load and see Ubuntu run. It looked good til I tried to look at some pictures on my hard drive.
It attempted to auto load all my pictures into Ubuntu's Picture viewer. It said running low on disk space, had to cancel.

When I rebooted Windows 7, my disk was not really out of space, so all was well...

Now that we know I can run it off of the cd, can I somehow make it a dual boot?

I will really need help, unless it is simple.

Thanks.

Hi :)

It is fairly simple but only with hindsight.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WindowsDualBoot

Typically the main thing we had problems understanding (without hindsight) were the things that Windows tried to "dumb-down" for us. Specifically that a single physical hard-drive can be 'split' into a number of "partitions" but Windows calls each partition a "drive". So some people think they have 2 hard-drives when they really only have 1 that has 2 partitions. Also despite the name a hard-drive must have at least 1 partition but it might only have 1. I am sure i have made that sound a lot more confusing than it really is.

It is good to get comfortable using a LiveCd before going further, there's no need to rush. The reason you got the error message "low on disk space" is because when you were running the LiveCd the only disk space available to it was on the Cd itself or possibly a virtual disk space in ram. Neither of those places have much space!

Part of the reason the LiveCd is such a useful tool is because it doesn't touch your hard-drive at all unless you really force it to. This means you can run a LiveCd session on someone else's machine to look up your bank account and make transactions leaving no trace of any of that on their machine. Some people run LiveCd sessions on their own machine for the extra security that brings when doing such things, no chance of the transaction getting hijacked by malware or carefully logged (at least at this end). How could a virus or trojan corrupt a system that is on a read-only cd?

Anyway the helpful link for installing a dual-boot alongside Windows is this one which does tend to have rather excessive detail, very verbose ...
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WindowsDualBoot

Good luck and regards as always from
Tom :)

I have a lot of reading to do tomorrow. I will follow the link Tom gave me.

Hope for the Best...

Stayed up late. Attempting to install as Dual Boot now from boot instead of from Windows.

It says Please wait, resizing partition...0% and it has been like that for a long time.

Is it normal to still say resizing partition for over an hour?

Or is something wrong again?

No error messages...Still Please Wait...

Hi,

Yes resizing a partition can takes time.

It depends on the size of the original partition, its fragmentation status, etc. When a partition is resized, especially a Windows one, it will be defragmented => all files will be read and written at the start of the partition so that it could be resized (down) and e.g. create free space for a new partition.

That's why, it's better to run the defragmentation program (eg from inside Windows) before resizing.

I'd done that previously (long time ago) on a 40 GB hard disk, which took me about 30 minutes to free half of it for installing Ubuntu.

Ok. Thanks. I have a 750 Gig With Windows 7 on it.

So I allocated 250 for Ubuntu on a Dual Boot.

Leaving about 435 Gig for Win 7.

So maybe I haven't crashed.

Still Says to, "Please wait 0% Resizing Partition.

I hope it works this time because after viewing it off the CD and seeing the ability to download add-ons, etc,
looks like Fun!

Hi,

Have you been running the install program from the live CD, after obtaining the Ubuntu desktop, or directly installed Ubuntu from the Live CD menu (immediately after the boot) ?

When you get to the partition step of the installation, Gparted should show you the used status of all your available partitions. If you have a large unused space, it should be quick to resize if you choose the new size of the Windows partition safely (ie with lots of the free space portion). In this case resizing the partition should be quite fast IMHO.

If you get stuck with no visible progress of the bar, unless the defragmentation hypothesis is right, maybe something got wrong?

Hi :)

Great to see excellent advice from Vu Do Quynh. Yes, resizing does take ages and it is better to defrag Windows from inside Windows first if possible. I guess someone needs to edit that into the dual-boot guide.

I tend to find the Windows Defragmenter is a bit rubbish so i usually try to use up the 1 month free-trial of Perfect Disk which allows you to defrag system-files. However, perhaps the Win7 one is better than the one in Vista, Xp, 2k, 98 but somehow i doubt they have done a re-write from scratch. Unfortunately PerfectDisk somehow always remembers which disk it was installed to so it is tough to choose the right time in the disks life to install it. Since it can defrag even across a network i tend to install it to an ancient drive and then defrag a few machines, hopefully that's going to work.

The good news is that Ubuntu really only needs 25Gb to be comfortable and can then read data that is on the Windows side of things. It can squeeze into 10Gb but 15Gb is better and 25Gb is just about perfect really.

In addition to the main partition you are going to install Ubuntu to it also needs another tiny partition about equal in size to your ram or 2xRam to be more comfortable. More than 2xRam is a waste of drive space tho so although it doesn't hurt the machine try to keep it reasonably small.

You can find out your ram size by getting to an Ubuntu command-line and typing in

free -m

the output gives a value for "memory" which is equal to your ram.

One of the guided options in the Partitioning section should do all of this fairly automatically although it does have a tendancy to play it safer than really needed and gives perhaps more space to Ubuntu than it really needs. Don't worry about this tho. If you have never installed an OS before then you might need to try reinstalling Ubuntu 2 or 3 times before you work out what is going on. Although that could be because i am one of those people that likes to tweak things to just past perfection and then want to go back to an unbroken state. Also Ubuntu's partition can be played around with quite a lot and we might be able to help you sort something a bit more perfect later.

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Ok. Did a Clean install off the CD. From Bootup, not from Windows this time.

Got the dual boot, it seems to be working. I like the newness of Ubuntu.

Been doing some add-ons, etc, one thing is that my USB Drives appeared right away.
So I made a shortcut to C:\ also, but it disappears everytime I reboot. How do I get it to stay?

Almost there I think...

Ok. Did a Clean install off the CD. From Bootup, not from Windows this time.

Got the dual boot, it seems to be working. I like the newness of Ubuntu.

Been doing some add-ons, etc, one thing is that my USB Drives appeared right away.
So I made a shortcut to C:\ also, but it disappears everytime I reboot. How do I get it to stay?

Almost there I think...

Hi :)

First thing to do now is to work through the Medibuntu worksheet to try to sort almost all your multimedia in one go
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu
This sorts the copywrite issues for whichever country you happen to be in. I keep the non-free components and haven't been asked to pay anything yet. One day i hope to go completely OpenSource but not today.

I am not sure a short-cut to C: is the most useful? Surely a link to "My Documents" would be more useful? I think the problem might be in trying to save it to the desktop? Perhaps if you made the link and then dragged it into "Documents"? I tend to use the "Places" menu and navigate from there nowadays but i can't remember why, perhaps i had the same problem ...

It's sounding good :)) Congrats and welcome to linux-land, especially the Ubuntu corner of it.
Regards from
Tom :)

Yes. It is Fun to Experiment with this. I like finding New Apps to check out.

I Guess the "Problems" are Solved. Thanks to ALL, especially TOM.

Hi :)

Thanks for that :)

For me the last step is to open OpenOffice click on

Tools - Options - Load/Save

and change all the drop-down menus to default to MicroSquish formats even tho they are less safe than the standard defaults. Windows users expect you to comply with their limited range of formats, especially in officey type things.

Glad you are enjoying exploring :)
Many regards from
Tom :)