2 Dual Install Issues: 1. Missing "install side by side" option with NFTS XP installed on laptop, 2.on Desktop, unable to dual boot because of black screen and strange code

I mean NTFS format

does this link help you at all?

http://apcmag.com/authors.htm?Aid=57

http://apcmag.com/how_to_dual_boot_windows_xp_and_linux_xp_installed_first.htm

did you select or check guided partion?

hope this helps http://ubuntuforums.org/

Hi :)

Always before installing or upgrading try to run a LiveCd session
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD
this will check that a number of things are ok, such as hardware compatibility & that you like the eye-candy (or can at least tolerate it long enough to re-theme it if its not something you like)

Ubuntu really needs at least 1GHz cpu, 1Gb ram and 15Gb hard-drive space it can work with less but would need more work during install. If your machine has lower specs then please let us know the specs so we can make better suggestions about which distro would work really well to get the most from the machine. Ubuntu is probably the heaviest distro and doesn't suit all machines. Linux offers choices.

If the machine is higher than those specs then a proper dual-boot install is much much better than trying to install it inside Windows. The link already given by subliminalfix looks like the excellent one i read ages ago but i prefer our Community Documentation
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WindowsDualBoot
mostly for the handy search feature at the top to find pages about other things

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

The guided partition (slider) is not listed as an option, its just not there.

However, I re-installed XP using FAT and this time Ubuntu saw it as an option to install side by side, but why didn't it work with NTFS?

I followed install on desktop to install side by side about 50 percent, but on reboot I got a black screen with a code on top.

My desktop has 512 ram, 80gb hard drive, 2.0ghz cpu.

Hi :)

Ubuntu does normally work well with ntfs & ntfs is very much safer format than fat32 since it is a journalised file-system. The problem appears to have been that Ubuntu was struggling with tooo little ram!

The 2GHz cpu mitigates for the 512Mb ram so you should be mostly ok. So, i would recommend switching to Xubuntu instead because it uses the much lighter-weight Xfce rather than the Gnome Desktop Envronment. Or perhaps just do

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

to bring in all the Xubuntu stuff, such as the much lighter-weight DE. Alternatively it might be good to try installing a completely different DE or WM (=window manager) such as lxde or e16 (or e17 from the enlightenment website, i would stick with e16 from the repos tho)

sudo apt-get install lxde

Which-ever of the 3 you try during a login click on the "Options" button rather than really loging in & change "session" to either Xfce, lxde or e16/17. It might be good to try them all out, just for a single session of each.

Another thing that might help with the low ram is to make sure you have a decent swap partition nearer the start of the drive. Read/write speeds at the start of a drive are about twice that of the read/write speeds at the end. Usually we don't have much choice because Windows takes up the huge space at the start of the drive and sometimes grumbles if we try to move it. Since you have just done a fresh install of Windows this is clearly not a problem for you to organise something like this

sda1 unchanged if its a tiny "recovery" or "rescue" partition which are quite often on laptops
sda2 Swap = 2 x ram (approx), definitely over 1xRam but at 3xRam it just wastes some space
sda3 an 8Gb (approx) Primary Partition as ext3 or 4 to set as "Mount Point" = / during install
sda4 Extended Partition filling the rest of the drive, inside this the logical partitions ...
 . sda5 a small Logical Partition as Ntfs, just large enough for Windows & a little elbow room
 . sda6 a 50Gb (or whatever is left) Logical Partition as Ntfs to set as "Mount Point" = /home during install
 . sda7 a 10Gb (approx) Logical Partition as ext3 or 4 to use as a "sandbox" area to test-drive installs of other linux distros and other Ubuntu releases such as the new 10.04

Note that Ntfs is not as stable and robust as linux file-systems such as ext3 or ext4 but it does have the huge advantage in dual-boot systems of being able to be used by Windows. Its not good to have Windows installed on the partition they share because Windows can be very flaky and grumbles if there is 1 file with a long file-name/path-name, such as any saved web-pages. Using a separate shared space mean that if Windows can't handle reading the partition then at least you can still boot into it & use basic functions, then you wouldn't have to reboot immediately into Ubuntu just to search for the file causing the trouble. The "Mount Points" can be set during install. When you reach the "Partitioning" section choose the very bottom option "Advanced" or "Manual" partitioning. Select and "Edit" or "Change" sda3 & sda6 to

sda3 /
sda6 /home

You can see that /home is a sub-directory of / and it is very useful to have on a separate partition because it contains ALL your normal user(s) data & settings. Since the /home partition does not need to be formatted during installs it keeps your data very much safer, reducing the usually vital need to back-up all your data. The / partition is almost always unavoidably formatted during installs which means any data stored on it would have to be backed up or else it would definitely be lost. With a separate /home it is still a good idea to back-up your data but usually there is no problem so the system becomes radically more robust.

Data partitions are better at the end of drives because operating systems generally don't read stuff straight from the data store. The vast difference in speed between hard-drive read/writes and Cpu speed means that any data actively being used by the cpu has to be "cached" (=queued up, prepared and ready). Some types of caches are faster than others. The on-chip caches, L1 is tiny but extremely fast, L2 is larger but a little slower. Then Ram is vastly slower (but vastly faster than hard-drive read/writes). Then Swap is another order-of-magnitude slower so Ram uses it for non-urgent stuff to be ready and waiting. Windows uses a swap-file called pagefile.sys but having it as a separate partition means it doesn't keep getting moved around the partition, so Ram can access it faster & more easily. The up-shot of all this is that read/writes from the data-partition (/home in linux's case) can be anticipated & planned for so that the hard-drives read/write head only needs to skate across and bang into position in a planned way at a convenient moment. The hasty panicked accesses to data in response to users actions are hopefully restricted to the swap & the ram. Beyond a certain size of swap the ram gets tooo full of just keeping track of where everything is in swap so much more than 2xRam can cause problems.

If you can put a swap space on a different drive from the / then the read/write head on each drive would hardly need to move at all so accesses should be faster and performance would improve.

On your machine i think that getting a swap partition to the start of the drive and/or switching to a lighter-weight DE should significantly improve performance. I would seriously consider getting more ram tho because the machine would be really powerful, it's just the small ram-size that is creating a bottle neck and restricting performance. If this is a laptop machine then it will be incredibly fussy about which Ram so check the speed on the label of your current ram and try to get some the same (or lok up the required speed in the mbord manual)

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

 I do have 1GB of ram on my laptop, so I'm still puzzled why the "install side by side" option was missing with XP NTFS.

On Desktop, even with 512ram UBUNTU install ok using the entire hard drive. I re-installed XP and installed UBUNTU using Wubi, runs good. But, was impossible to dual boot-kept getting black screen.

Hi :)

Does the LiveCd session boot up to a working desktop on the laptop & on the desktop? You might need to use a combination of boot options. Keep a track of which boot-options work as each machine probably needs slightly different options.

Installing using the Wubi (Ubuntu inside Windows) is unlikely to work even if you had more Ram. Please try booting up a LiveCd session and once you have that working then install Ubuntu using the icon on the Live Cd's desktop.

Try
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD
and use that to install like this
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WindowsDualBoot#1.%20Recovering%20GRUB%20after%20reinstalling%20Windows

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)