Dual-boot linpus and ubuntu

I have been trying to make a dual boot system on my 8 gig ssd model and have so far been unsuccessful. I tried to partition everything before hand but then the Acer software wiped it out. I then tried to use the Ubuntu installer to shrink the linpus partition and the partitioner kept spitting back an error saying that it can't. Am I doing something wrong? Can someone please point me in the right direction.

Sean

 

I have the 120GB hard disk AAO and triple boot Windows XP, Ubuntu, and Linpus. (Only Windows XP came pre-installed.)

I first repartitioned the drive to make room for ubuntu and everything worked as expected. After a while I downloaded Linpus and repartitioned again using a Gparted USB boot drive. Things did not work so well this time. I don't understand what went wrong, but the rearranged partitions were in a funny order. Worse, parted didn't see any partition at all! Fdisk saw the partition table and everything looked ok. Nevertheless windows, linpus, ubuntu would not boot. Grub gave Error 17 and windows said it couldn't find hal.dll. fsck, running from a rescue disk, found no errors and each partition could be mounted.

Then I discovered a utility called testdisk on the Gparted boot disk. testdisk was able to locate all the partitions and restore my totally wrecked partition table. Grub then successfully booted ubuntu and linpus, but windows would still not boot giving the strange error about a missing hal.dll.

So I mounted the windows partition from ubuntu, took a look at boot.ini and discovered that the windows bootloader thought windows was on partition 1 of disk 0 when in fact it had been moved to partition zero. Changing partition(1) to partition(0) fixed my windows boot.

Try using testdisk, found on the Gparted boot disk or Supergrub (google for it) before you assume that a partition(s) has been "wiped out." It may just be that the partition table got screwed up.

 

The problem turned out to be that my Linpus install was bad. I tried everything again from scratch and it worked fine. The Linpus partition shrunk properly and I was able to install Ubuntu eee with no problem. Thank everyone for at least looking at my problem, now I just need to get Ubuntu to use my SD card as a home directory. Can anyone help with that?

Sean

 

Are you sure it's a good idea to put /home/user on an SD card?

I hear all kinds of conflicting claims about the reliability of flash media vs. actual hard disk, but the gist of it seems to be that flash media wears out quickly if it is frequently written. That is, it's intended for few writes, lots of reads--the way it would be treated inside an iPod or other media player.

Also, your home directory doesn't just contain the stuff you put there, but all kinds of hidden (as in dotfiles .something_configfile) files which your apps created. The SD card will get written to often with many small files and if you take it out, I wonder if the Acer GUI would even start w/o its groups-app.xml file?

Your post is a little old. Have you tried it yet? How'd it go?