Installed Ubuntu on external HDD, can't start Vista now

Hello,

what do you mean by "but when I try to boot up to Windows without the USB HDD plugged in, nothing happens" ?

With my Windows HDD in the laptop and without my USB HDD (with Ubuntu on it) plugged in when I start up the computer, I get the Gateway startup screen and then a black screen with a blinking cursor in the upper left hand corner. Nothing happens and I end up turning off the computer by holding down the power button.

Have you had a look at your bios to check the boot order includes your internal hard-drive still?

It sounds like your Vista boot is still all there and the MasterBootRecord is still as fine as it was. It's just having trouble accessing your disk during the bootup i think.

Usually either the delete or the F2 key get you into the bios during the first stage of booting up. And you can always escape from the bios without saving changes.

lol, i just noticed you said Ubuntu 7.10 which is ancient now. Download 8.04 or 8.10 desktop soooon and give one of them a try as a favour to yourself. I think they are much better than 7.10.

If you really need a lighter OS then maybe go for a different distro but go for an up-to-date one rather than something ancient and unsupported. Some of the ones designed to run from a cd are good fun. Puppy and Wolvix are worth a shot and SliTaz is amazing, you can even pull the cd (or USB) out once its started up and it just runs from ram! Feather seems pretty good if you want to install a tiny OS but i run Ubuntu from a 20Gb drive and rarely manage to fill the drive! I haven't really explored tiny OS's to install but i'm having great fun trying out Live Cd distros on my old machine (a PII, with 128Mb ram lol).

Note that running a distro from a cd will run slow compared with running it installed on a hard-drive (although i guess that after a few programs and antivirus stuff its all evened up a bit).

Anyway, good luck and have fun. Welcome in :)

errr, Ubunut 7.10 probably is still supported tho

errr, Ubuntu 7.10 probably is still supported tho

Yeah, I checked the bios and the main hard drive is still on the boot list. I moved the USB External Hard Drive ahead of the internal HDD on the boot list so I could boot to Ubuntu just by plugging in the USB HDD and then turning on the computer. But Vista won't boot no matter where the HDD is - internal or USB enclosure.

And I did check to see if Ubuntu found the internal (Vista) HDD and it did. So the hard drive shows up, is on the boot list but still no Vista....?

Yes, Ubuntu 7.10 is old but I figured I would just update to 8.04 or 8.10 once I have all this stuff figured out.

Basically, your asking for is directions in how to repair a Windows Vista installation. Unfortunetly, your asking the wrong group of folks. It's not that we don't want to help you. (I would if I could) But, I have never used Vista. While I could help you repair XP, many of us purposefully have little to no experience fixing newer Microsoft products. Thanks to Ubuntu we don't have to frustrate ourselves with it anymore.

Back to the root cause of your problem: Removing hardware to install Ubuntu safely isn't the way to go. Ubuntu is designed to be much easier to install safely with Windows than you expect. The best way to install Ubuntu without messing with Vista is to use the Ubuntu Wubi installer: http://wubi-installer.org/ Directions with screen shots can be found here: http://www.howtoforge.com/wubi_ubuntu_on_windows

The wubi installer will install Ubuntu inside a file in Windows. You do not have to mess with partitions or dual booting. Simply point click and finish. And you can then uninstall and reinstall Ubuntu like any other windows program. You will have a slight performance slow down this way, but you'll get much better performance than running off of a USB drive because USB is slow.

Ahh, newer versions have usually fixed things that may have been troublesome in previous versions. Anyway, lets not worry about that - i did pretty much the same.

Ok, so bios is kinda looking good. I'm still a bit iffy about whether your bios is really doing what you want and is itself aware of the internal hard-drive but it's kinda sounding good. It does sound as though its the next step that's the problem. i reckon that getting the Vista disk to boot is going to require fixing the MBR for which i only know Linux solution's.

Personally from what you've said and assuming you have a spare 10Gb (although 5Gb would be ample) on your Vista drive then i would set-up a dual boot to default into Vista and then cut the choice down to something small enough to be obscure but not impossible to use - say 5secs.

Its probably possible to use the 7.10 as a Live Cd (boot disk) with just the Vista drive. Then get a terminal window and just do grub-install Sadly i still find that all quite baffling and you'll see what i mean when you try it as i described cos it just pulls up a help file i don't understand. But if you could install grub to replace the mbr it would pick=up on Vista as the only operating system available and would boot straight into that. Grub-loader doesn't need a linux distro to boot into and can be used to multi-boot into different versions of Windows if you were mad enough to try that (i haven't, yet)

Greg, thanks for the tip on the wubi installer. I'll probably use that for simplicity once I get all this straightened out.

Tom, if I go into the BIOS setup menu, it does display my Vista HDD info. As for the grub-install to replace the MBR and pick up on Vista, how would you do that? I'm a linux newbie and have no real experience with grub-anything or code. You think that running this grub-installer would find Vista and reset the MBR to boot into that?

i tried the Wubi and didn't like it because of typical Windows shoddiness. While it was installed it seemed fine but i felt i had skilfully combined and exacerbated the problems of both OS's, lol

When i uninstalled it every Windows bootup got interrupted asking if i wanted to boot into the Linux which i had uninstalled. I bet there's stuff left in the registry too.

Ok, i know i'm fussing but i just prefer being definitely in Windows or definitely in Linux (unless its Wine, of course)

Ok, good info to know about Wubi. Any pointers / instructions on how to do the grub installer to reset the MBR to find Vista?

I think the grub-install would do the trick but i have never done it myself and don't even know anyone that has done it. Its not an easy route.

Dual boot set up should be easy, even with Vista and even using my complex method.

I downloaded and burned a 7.10 cd and used it as a live cd on my old machine. Now to partition and install so that Ubuntu's grub loader will fix the MBR on the Vista drive.

Partitioning
Using; System - Administration - Partition Editor gives a nice Gui for resizing the Vista partition. Shrink approx 7200Mb off the end rather than the beginning. Create a new partition of maybe 2048Mb or twice your ram (whichever is the smaller) but change it's Filesystem to linux-swap using the drop down menu on that pop-up box. When you click Add then the new partition should appear as a red line or box. Now create a New partition of over 4000Mb to fill the remaining space but change this one's Filesystem to ext3. The Gui should now show a long green box then a thin red line/box then a blue box/line. Make sure you laptop is plugged in or has plenty of power because step 1, the resizing, must not be interrupted and may well take ages. Click Apply and just watch for a few seconds to see that it's started and then go take a break and let the machine do its thing. Note that we're giving Ubuntu plenty of space here to give it a fair go but not so much that it will be noticed much. If there was a problem with resizing and no new partitions got created then try closing and reopening the Partition Editor just so you can see how your drive looks. A screen shot of that saved as a gif file can be a useful attachment if you need help at that point. If you have manged to get a red linux-swap ten right click and put swap-on to help the live cd run more smoothly.

Installing.
Assuming you eventually managed to get an ext2 or ext3 partition of over 4Gb on the Vista drive and you are running Ubuntu as a live-cd then just double click install icon on the desktop and follow the instructions. It should be straight-forwards now especially as you have done this before on the other drive. I had to choose the maual option at the 'Preparing Partitions' stage to make sure i changed the mount point of the ext3 to a single / which means its the root directory (roughly the equivalent of C: in the Windows side of my dual bootup). Oh and it made a fuss because i hadn't shutdown my Windows properly so i just clicked ignore on those pop-ups. But now it should be just the same as before.

Good luck

Its shed-loads easier using the grub-installer that's packaged with a distro.

If you like Ubuntu then i'd install ubuntu, otherwise i would have gone for a very light distro such as Puppy, Wolvix, sliTaz or Feather. This week it'd have been Feather. Any of the first 3 can easily install on just a 1Gb partition, maybe even smaller in the case of sliTaz. None of those 4 need much ram either but they're all a bit different from Ubuntu in that they don't have as much functionality as Ubuntu built in and are all a bit limited in different ways. They're great if you've got an old PII slow machine with almost no ram and hardly any drive space. I've managed to watch movies, browse the internet, play some games and edit office documents on all of them except Feather, which is my new toy :)

It's shed-loads easier using the grub-installer that's packaged with a distro.

If you like Ubuntu then i'd install ubuntu, otherwise i would have gone for a very light distro such as Puppy, Wolvix, sliTaz or Feather. This week it'd have been Feather. Any of the first 3 can easily install on just a 1Gb partition, maybe even smaller in the case of sliTaz. None of those 4 need much ram either but they're all a bit different from Ubuntu in that they don't have as much functionality as Ubuntu built in and are all a bit limited in different ways. They're great if you've got an old PII slow machine with almost no ram and hardly any drive space. I've managed to watch movies, browse the internet, play some games and edit office documents on all of them except Feather, which is my new toy :)

Dohh lol

Hmmm, wow i'm curious to find out how it went. I'm wondering if Gparted got stuck and couldn't do anything to the Vista.

Following this 'worst case scenario' route but which may have happened. At least the data on Vista should still be safe as Gparted is pretty careful to avoid damaging data, although it can be used to completely wipe everything if pushed.

Assuming then that partitioning didn't work ... I would;
      plug in the Vista drive inside
      plug in the external drive
      set the bios to boot the external drive
Once into Ubuntu on the external drive i'd
      modify the grub-loader to pick-up on Vista (sounds tougher than it is)
      reboot into Vista and maybe
                                 clear some space
                                 burn a 8.10 cd (or a tiny distro) and
                                 run a defrag
                           but definitely i'd make sure i shutdown cleanly
                           rather than using the hardware power-switches.
Then i'd do all the partitioning i described above and install Ubuntu (or which-ever distro) making sure the grub loader got stored on the Vista disk and included an option for booting into Vista by default.

As i say i hope it didn't come to this but it may well have done. Sorry if i haven't been helpful in following the ways that you wanted to explore.

Good luck and hopefully it's all fixed now? Happy hunting ;)

Sometimes tiny distros use Lilo instead of Grub but it should be good enough to use either package rather than the Windows boot-loaders. Both are much cleverer at picking up on multiple operating systems and setting up multi-boots.

The Grub homepage is
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/
if you're really keen to try a really tough route

Has this problem been sorted out or are you still having trouble?

Happy new year (hopefully) btw
Regards from
Tom

Thanks Tom, that solved my question.

Blimey thanks. I hope you're ok and post a new question soon
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)