2Nd Pc - Boot Problems

[OnOff]

Have my old P4 desktop that I figured I'd rebuild at work as it's sitting there doing nowt now. Back in the day it was the BEST pc in the company, the graphics card was selected specifically for CAD and was from memory about £700. Dual monitors etc. Time marches on and the HDD was full to the brim, it was slow to load etc. It WAS my primary pc but they've given me a God awful Windows 7 thing, it's 64-bit, I can't run my full version AutoCAD on it etc. I've had to add serial port cards, Firewire, extra USB ports and a USB 3.5" FDD just to try and get it something like the old one. I removed the P4's 80GB HDD and have, via SATA to IDE converter slapped that into the Win 7 PC. All good now to access my old files. Did try for a while over the network but with the P4 being so slow to load etc............

So, the "plan" then WAS to create a dual boot XP Pro / Ubuntu machine. It has 2GB of RAM, DVD-ROM and CD-RW, 3.5" FDD. In lieu of the 80GB original drive I bought a new 160GB IDE drive.

Somewhere though in trying to first load Win XP Pro on I've gone wrong! Now when it starts getting the message:

Error loading operating system

I did reset "something" in the BIOS to it's default settings...............but what I'm not sure what! Any ideas what I might have done?

One thing, my Ubuntu is on a DVD-RW and the DVD-ROM drive (it's old) won't read it. Is there an earlier Linux that will fit on a CDR?

Thanks as always!

 

[steptoe]

yer,

1st up,

I know jack all about computers, and, if you use an older system of ubuntu it may well be a nightmare upgrading it.causing various conflicts etc, it will be so old a version!

but, I know for sure that 9.10 will fit a CD, and I thinkl 10.04 will too,

when you try and boot ubuntu select the 'check disc for errors' option, it will then tell you if the md5 is corrupt or not, or, you can check it manually, but Im not sure how.

if you dual boot, use the live CD to make your partitions, then install windoze first.

as for the windows error, have you formatted and partitioned the HDD correctly before trying to install it?

as for your DVD being wrong, some older drives will only read DVD-R and others only DVD+R and some wont read RW at all.

 

[OnOff]

Cheers for the pointers.............I wonder............the pc has USB ports.......some 1.1 & some 2.0. Would it work if I "booted" a later Linux off a USB stick? Not sure but I guess I would have to set the BIOS to read the USB first.......if that's possible.

I quick formatted the drive to NTFS in the Windows 7 pc before putting it in the P4.

Yep, I figured the DVD-ROM was incompatible / too old to read the DVD-RW!

 

[steptoe]

Yer, I have persistent USB Ubuntu , IIRC its a slightly different download and burning process for USB,

You can fit a LIVE version on a small stick though, and boot and install that way,

If you want to make partitions etc I find older versions better, I keep am old 9.04 for that reason,

Then install windows on the NTFS partition, then install Ubuntu afterwards,

You can make a large partition as NTFS or FAT and both Ubuntu and XP can both read from it for documents, pix, etc.

 

[steptoe]

HFS+ is pretty good

and you think windows will be able to see that?!   :slap