Ubuntu replacing Unbootable Vista. Can you help me save the data first?

Ahhh, it's often better to try for a proper Dual-boot system at first until you've got to grips with ubuntu. It's often quite powerful to have a Linux dual-booting with Windows so that you get the best of both worlds.

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

Sometimes a dual-boot with 2 versions of linux can be fun but then you're restricted to committing to the previously unknown (to you (presumably)) and it usually takes a few weeks to get used to Linux-land.

Welcome in and i hope you enjoy the benefits of greater security and freedom :)
Regards from
Tom

The trouble with using the Vista bootable Cd is that i haven't a clue about how to work with Vista. Puppy is so easy to use that even as a complete noob i was quickly able to get onto my local ethernet and straight onto the web - with just a few simple (and fairly obvious) mouse clicks.

Also with Vista and Ubuntu it's impossible to remove the Cd as they are both quite large and powerful. Puppy and sliTaz lack the rich features you'd expect from a fully installed OS but that gives them the advantage in being able to run from a Cd which can be removed when you get to the desktop.

The iso are fairly easy to make from pretty much any computer, even in Windows. Just insert a blank cd and double click on the iso image. Full instructions here
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/iso

Good luck with this
Regards from
Tom

This looks good Tom. I'll probably need some time too work on this but I'll let you know how things turn out - or prompt you with some additional questions.

Is Beryl or Compiz something I should install? Is it too unstable still?
The Windows emulator is quite good in Ubuntu I think I heard somewhere?

Heh - I started with Xenix and I miss the black screen and Bourne $hell every day. More worried about music and graphics for the kid.

I'll keep you posted. Thanks alot.
Bjarni.

Lol, sounds like you know more about some of this than me :)

Compiz is great fun and awes people sometimes (not that i've managed to use any of its features really). I tend to keep it switched off to avoid distractions. Wine 1.0.1 is great but "Wine Is Not an Emulator" lol - it's much more integrated with the desktop than that and doesn't act as another layer on top of Ubuntu, which means it's a lot faster. So far i've been lucky enough to avoid using it as i have always managed to find a native linux equivalent that's better for me.

Good luck :)

what message is displayed when vista boots up

please reply
Gaurav Nagar

Hi Gaurav.

I'm prompted with two options when Vista tries to boot. Repair system or Start Windows Normally. Either option takes me back to the same screen. Pressing F8 and selecting other boot options (Safe Mode etc...) also results in the same screen. Only option with anything else is to select not to restart on failure. That brings up the Blue screen of death with some error code. I don't have the code right now but looking it up it means basicly - cannot load system from disk.

I have a thread at Microsoft Technet here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/itprovistasp/thread/9a87f5c0-9e7a-411d-a54c-a912deaa5a95/

And there are a number of threads about similar issues. Haven't found any useful solutions in them.

I am playing with Puppy as suggested by Tom. Took ages to load kernel drivers to access the disk drives yesterday. Almost gave up on it but it finally took off. It mounts the NTFS and I can access all the files. What a thing of beauty. Next step is to transfer the files. I'm currently waiting for Puppy to boot again. Seems to be a struggle.....

Best regards,
Bjarni.

Yeah, sorry about that. Puppy does take ages to start up, especially at the point where it loads itself into Ram. SliTaz is much faster at doing that but Puppy is much more user-friendly and has more apps (i.e. is more bloated) (probably why it's slower to boot). Wolvix is the fastest boot and good if you're not going to need your cd drive for anything else. Main problem i have with sliTaz is that i have to remember to switch it to english. On the other hand my french seems to be improving! lol

Errr also im not keen on the sliTaz file-browser although it looks like something that would greatly boost productivity - especially for copying files and stuff. Much better than a tabbed file-browser but i'm not used to it yet.

I think the Vista system default disk is likely to wipe your disc, It's the kind of clever stuff we've learned to expect from Windoze over the years. I'm pleasantly surprised their startup disk didn't.

lol about
"One of the problems with an unbootable system is that you need live support to walk you through a step-by-step recovery process."
That forum is practically a goldmine for anti-Windows propaganda. A single boot Windows system is just tooo vulnerable. Dual boot between Windows and Linux is just soooo much better for sorting stuff out. Sadly you can't really resize the Vista partition (Xp was ok) unless you get it to boot - which is the main problem in the first place ;) Boot Cds are ok but it'd be better to have a really competitive Linux such as Ubuntu with fully fledged apps. I still think it's worth keeping the Vista if that's reasonably possible because re-installing Windows is a nightmare - collecting all the appropriate software is too tough. For gaming and multimedia it's still better to have access to Windows as Wine still can't quite handle a lot of games and hardware-manufacturers are reluctant to let people have decent drivers for fully utilising their products in Linux. Personnaly i find Totem absolutely brilliant and i almost never leave Ubuntu these days, unless it's to help a friend.

I wrote off to Microsoft querying why their "email support" to fix problems that their own advice caused is free in the States but is charged for elsewhere. I asked them if Microsoft products should only be bought by people in the States.

I find the "Contact Us" part of hardware manufacturers websites quite good for venting too.

Hi again.

I installed Puppy with little trouble. Took a good deal of time to boot it as I mentioned. Actually - it was halted I think. The solution seemed to be to press Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and Enter. This is what you do to escape from the video card testing I believe - and I figured it would be the cause - and it worked in anycase.

For the record - on Acer Aspire 5100 - you should select Xvesa driver. Boots with no trouble now.
Got the wireless up and running in no time. On second thought I decided to find me a cable and use the 1GB local net for transferring files. The ethernet went up smoothly but I couldn't find a way to disable the wireless and all transfer wanted thru there. I had to delete the profile for the wireless completely to activate the ethernet. My ignorance, I'm sure.

Puppy comes with everything you need. PMount automatically detects all devices, including the NTFS disks, USB's and CD/DVD. Just click on the Icon created on desktop to view the disk contents.

Puppy also includes pureFTPd server - already running - and PcurlFTP for ftp file sharing. Both something I could have used probably. I didn't find out in a jiffy how to share the mounted devices though. All I got shared was the symbolic link - but that's no good. Didn't dive into the matter as a third option - Pnethood Samba Shares worked like charm. With that I could open a shared folder on another computer and copy from the NTFS system.

In short - I have copied all neccessary files to the backup and will start a clean setup of Ubuntu on the laptop tomorrow.

Data saved - Case closed.

Dual-Boot Is handy of course. But I have a few computers here at home and Windows (XP i'll stick to for the moment) will be around for awhile on some of them should it be needed.

I'm not very pleased with the assistance - or lack thereof - I got from Microsoft Support, although the guy on Technet seems fine. The support page offers three options. Chat, Email and Phone support. The two first are only for USA it says on the page - and that is a strong indication that the Phone support is for everyone. But alas....

I got first class help here though. Thank you guys - especially you Tom of course.

Later.
Bjarni.

Thanks Tom, that solved my question.

Thanks. If xorg didnt work and you needed Xvesa (much lighter weight) then getting Ubuntu on will be tough as it's only built with Xorg.

It's a bit weird that Vista worked at all. Maybe you can switch to the xorg with the puppy that's installed on the hard-drive? Maybe the extra free Ram and a linux-swap partition will give it enough more boost? Lots to try out there before trying to find a way of switching xorg for xvesa in Ubuntu. If you're enjoying using Puppy then maybe just keep that. You can add some smaller versions of Firefox (actually a version called "BonEcho") and maybe some office apps? The puppy community is reasonably large. i found it easier to find a different version of Puppy that already included what i needed. At the moment i like MiPup2.6 best. If you're not going for a fully bloated distro then Wolvix is pretty good because its not compressed linux so you can add packages easily and the package manager is searchable. I always change the desktop & try to theme it. Wolvix 2.0.0 is well on the way but is being beta tested (or is it still alpha) download then forum follows ...
ftp://ftp.wolvix.org/wolvix/files/wcp/wcp-2.0.0.1-i486-2cpg.tgz
http://forums.wolvix.org/index.php

Hmmm, i'm tired so probably rambling nonsensically
Take care and have fun
Regards from
Tom :)

Hi.

Xorg did work actually. There seemed to be some problems in the initialization however. I didn't write anything down in this process so this is by memory:

- Upon the first boot on the Puppy CD it didn't get pass the first step without help. "Loading kernel drivers needed to access disk drives" was the only thing on the screen. I waited, probably half an hour, before doing anything. Pressing <Enter> at that time was enough to get it going, as I recall it.
- I selected Xorg. That resulted in a black screen. Google took me to some page indicating that Ctrl-Alt-Backspace was something to try. Some combination of that and a few <Enters> got me pass the initialization somehow. Cannot recall details though. Xorg worked fine once it got going.

- The next boot was similar except that I needed to press Crtl-Alt-Backspace and <Enter> to get pass the first line. I selected Xvesa that time and it went smoothly. My settings where not saved though. I was prompted with the option to save - the only choice being to save to file. I was never prompted with a device to save it to though and the system froze. I had to power it off.

- Consequent boots work fine - and now my sessions are saved (to usb) and booting much faster.

- I tried to switch back to Xorg after your last message - this time from the Setup menu. And what do you know..... It works without trouble now.

What it all boils downto beats me. Maybe the xorg.conf is configured differently when switching to it in X. Maybe I did something wrong in the process. Someone who knows the details of the booting might know.

I think I'll stick to Ubuntu on this laptop. My mother uses it without trouble - so it cant be bad. Will probably look further into other systems though - and plan to make my own puter a dual boot one. Plenty of space there....

Best regards,
Bjarni.

Ubuntu is the best imo, i've havent tried many other full distros but Ubuntu was easily the easiest to install and use.

The tiny distros are great for fixing things. I was initially drawn to them because they were great at fixing Windows problems. The partition editor and boot-loaders were particularly useful but just being able to copy back crucial system files has helped too.

They are also great for breathing new life into dying machines and even resurrecting old ones that would otherwise become landfill.

But i'd rather have Ubuntu where i can :)

Regards from
Tom :)

Just a remark....

The Ubuntu installation disk has everything I needed in the first place. It's a bootable disk with all the utilities. Over 700MB but very neat.

Best regards,
Bjarni.

Ubuntu is the best. I think it lacks things like Xvesa and Gparted but they aren't needed for most of what the Ubuntu LiveCd is about. Having extremely techine tools would be too confusing (i think) in a desktop primarily aimed at non-techi people. Anyway i think it's good to get used to having such variety easily available and good to see the similarities too. Without diversity life would be dull ;)

Regards and thanks from
Tom :)