Dual-booting Ubuntu 8.04 + Windows XP (without modifying the MBR!)

About 10 years ago, I met a guy at some kind of community festival or something in Columbus, OH. He was running an open-source software booth. He gave me a CD pre-loaded with Red Hat Linux. I never used the CD, but I’ve sort of followed the development of increasingly user-friendly (translate: n00b-friendly) Linux distributions since then. Recently (3 or 4 years back) I decided it was finally worth my while to take the plunge. Note that I still dilly-dallied for a while.

I have an older tower in the back office that I don’t use much, now that I have this spiffy laptop from work. It just got a 500GB second hard drive installed in it, back in May. Last night, I finally rolled up my sleeves and got to work. It turns out Ubuntu is now insanely easy to install. Easier than Windows, in my case. Lots easier. No hardware issues, everything detected perfectly (even the USB ports that are only recognized 1/4 of the time in XP were mounted automatically and with no issues).

The most jarringly pleasant difference from installing Windows was the absence of repeated phone calls to Microsoft’s Genuine Windows Validation Hotline, trying to explain that, no, I was not a skanky software pirate, selling unauthorized multi-terminal licenses of their precious product; I was simply trying to install said bleepenating product on my computer for the fifth time because it kept crashing during install, and would they please unlblock the software I just spent loads of money on and was trying to legally use.

I don’t know if it’s true or not, but one of my students (a finance grad) recently told me that Microsoft’s profit margins are above 80%. If true (sounds insane, but who knows?), that means they’re dozens of times more profitable than, say, pharmaceutical companies, and over 100 times more profitable than most  others. And they didn’t get there by treating unauthorized multiple-computer-installers with kid gloves, lemme tell ya.

Back to the story: I had to make my install a little more complicated, so I manually partitioned my hard drive, among other things. I wanted to leave Windows completely alone, because sometimes the dual-boot install thing can mangle the Microshafties, or so I’ve heard. So I found this tutorial (the first post in the thread) about how to install while leaving the Master Boot Record alone. I put the entire ubuntu install on the second hard drive, with (to my knowledge) not a byte of Linux code on the original first-HD where Windows XP resides. It took me a couple of hours, but only to figure out enough about the Linux file system conventions and the one single termina command used in the tutorial to feel comfortable doing it, but then I did it! No problems. If I had known a little more about Linux before starting, it would have taken 15 minutes. Smooth like buttah.

As you can see from the above screen photos, I am now just another Linux n00b. :D  Now, I will share (not that anyone who reads this really cares, and I can’t blame them) my partitioning scheme:

hda1 — primary partition – ntfs (80GB) – Windows XP (the whole disk)
hdb1 — primary partition  – ext3 (30GB) -  / (root)
hdb2 — primary partition – linux-swap (4GB) – /swap
hdb3 — primary partition – ext3 – (20GB) – /home
hdb4 — (extended partition)
- hdb5 – logical partition – ext3 (~200GB) – /data (for linux-type data; accessible from XP, with special driver)
- hdb6 – logical partition – ntfs (~200GB) – /ntfs (for data needing to be accessed from either OS)

I feel so very nerdily cool right now.