meddlingBanter

I’ve been contemplating installing Vista on my laptop for the last couple months, ever since I downloaded my copy from GVSU’s MSDAA.  Finally this weekend I had the time to install Vista since I didn’t go to Grand Rapids like I normally do.  Normally installing Vista is pretty straight forward.  Pop the disc in, wait 20 min or so and you’re up and running Vista.  Everything is automated, I don’t think I had to enter in more than a serial number and pick my HD partition before I had Vista installed, XP took far more time and is much less automated.  Vista impressed me with that.

Prior to this install though I’ve been dual booting XP and Ubuntu with a shared 20 GB NTFS partition between the two OS’s.  I had the space to put Vista on my laptop, but having XP and Ubuntu on there already made things a little more difficult.  Prior to installing Vista I had two stipulations:

• Keep my XP and Ubuntu installs Untouched

• Use only GRUB as my boot manager 

Looking around online there were a lot of guides for triple booting XP, Ubuntu, and Vista.  Most them come from the stand point of installing fresh copies of each OS.  Since I already have some fairly tweaked XP and Ubuntu installs, I didn’t want to reinstall the OS’s and reinstall everything all over again.  In all my googling and searching Ubuntu forums I found a blog telling how to dual boot Vista and Ubuntu with Ubuntu already installed, basically just installing Vista on a separate partition or drive then replacing the new Vista boot loader with GRUB and then adding Vista to the GRUB menu.  Seemed simple enough and I thought this would work perfect for me.  I didn’t realize how Vista’s boot loader worked at the time.  I then proceeded with the install.  Once Vista was installed and I had GRUB setup again to boot Vista, XP, and Ubuntu, booting to the new Vista install didn’t work and booting the XP install just brought me to the Vista boot loader, giving me the option for Vista or XP.  At this point I had a triple boot system, but not exactly what I was looking for.  

I then found a GUIDE which explained things a little more clearly.  Vista’s boot loader was installed to my XP partition which messed everything up.  When I would try to boot Vista, the boot loader wasn’t on that partition so GRUB just crapped out.  At this point I needed to reinstall Vista, but when I install Vista, I had to hide my XP partition.  All of that is explained in the GUIDE.  This way Vista doesn’t think I want to dual boot my machine and installs Vista normally.  To fix what I had done in my previous attempt I first used my XP boot disc to run FIXMBR and FIXBOOT on my XP install.  Vista put its boot loader on that partition so I needed to remove that boat loader and just use XP’s boot loader.  Once that worked, I followed the GUIDE to install Vista.

After all that, I’m now triple booting and everything is working wonderfully.  I’m writing this post in Vista right now.  I like Vista so far, though my laptop seriously sucks in the graphics department so I can’t run Aero Glass, but honestly I really don’t need that feature, I just wish I could change the color of my Windows to black.  For some reason none of that functionality works unless you can support aero.  Everything else runs great so far.  I’m sure I’ll be posting issues in the future once I start using it more and more.  My boss at work curses Vista out almost hourly.  Sometimes I think he over exaggerates though. 

 Abby sent me some new HDR photos she did, I’m going to post them here for your enjoyment.