On 28 January 2012 19:02, Barry Drake <ubuntu-advertis...@gmx.com> wrote: > On 28/01/12 17:31, Liam Proven wrote: >> >> On 28 January 2012 16:27, Ted Wager<t...@trufflesdad.plus.com> wrote: >>> >>> I am not bothered. abt the data..All I want is for the machine to boot >>> from the hdd so the buyer can install an os. If they want a Linux system >>> I will install it but if they want Windows they are on their own. >> >> Use a DOS boot floppy - or USB stick - and type: >> fdisk /mbr > > Thanks for the link. I'll try to make a dos boot stick or boot cd. I no > longer have a floppy drive.
Fair enough. Many don't. I still find them jolly useful myself. > Actually, I did find that after re-formatting a > drive using gparted, a Windows 7 installer disk refused to do anything > because it declared that the target drive was not a valid bootable drive. That may be the case, I am not denying it, but it's not GParted's fault. I have installed many *many* copies of Windows onto disks partitioned with Gparted. It must have been something else - perhaps an invalid partitioning scheme, or out-of-order partitions, or something. > Before re-formatting, it was bootable into Windows XP and I re-formatted to > get a fresh start. I was not trying to use grub or set up dual boot. I > simply wanted a fresh install of Windows 7. Ubuntu was quite happy to > install to the same drive. Ubuntu is a lot less fussy about partition layouts than Windows is. Ubuntu will happily boot from a secondary (logical) partition, a secondary drive and so on, so long as a bootloader gets the kernel into RAM. Windows, for a simple life, wants a primary bootable partition on the first hard disk, and Win Vista/7 insist on it being formatted with NTFS. XP & earlier will happily boot off FAT16 or FAT32. You can install it into a logical partition, but it needs to write some files into a bootable primary partition on the 1st drive if so. I.e. the "\WINDOWS" folder and so on could be in partition D: on the 2nd disk, but the bootloader etc. have to be in a bootable primary partition on disk 0. > In addition, I tried a Win XP install disk, and this failed with the same > error message. Definitely a screwy partitioning setup, I suspect. > There seemed to be no way to get it to work until I restored > the mbr. As I had no dos or Windows to work from (using fdisk) FreeDOS will do it and is a free download. > Clonezilla > provided me with a (slower) easy way to do the job. I finished the day > disliking Windows even more intensely than ever before. I can understand that! > Win 95 did at least > let you use commandline tools such as fdisk and format from the install > disk. Then things got worse. It was easier in some ways. There are tools on the NT/XP/etc boot CD or DVD to partition, format, set partitions bootable, rewrite the MBR, the bootloader and so on but they are not easy to use. The command-prompt partitioner, in particular, is a complete pig. I am something of a specialist in this area and I've never got it to work for me. -- Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884 -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
