[dborjal007]

Hi all,

I'm new to Ubuntu 7.10 and I have installed onto my second hard drive. I'm trying to learn this OS that everyone is raving about. My colleague and friend has told me that this is one of the most secure OS on the market. So far so good, I think.

Well as much as everyone is raving about it, I would still like to access my windows drive. This is where my problems begin, when my pc loads I get the option to chose which operating system to choose. I choose windows but the issue is when I get to the splash screen, it just sits there and does nothing else. I wait for about five to ten minutes but it just stays on that screen. Is there something I can do to speed up my loading time or troubleshoot this problem?

Many thanks,

--Dan

[John A]

Hi,

Could you provide more information about your setup, please? What does your partition layout look like? What filesystems are you using for your operating systems? What version of Windows do you have? Some computers have a hidden 'recovery' partition stored on the hard drive in the case that the primary partition fails to boot.

Finally, you can try manually booting Windows by using the following commands at the GRUB promp (hit 'C' to get to the command prompt as instructed by the GRUB menu)t:

rootnoverify(hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
boot

In the above example, hd0 refers to the first hard drive on your system. If you have multiple hard drives, hd1 would refer to the second hard drive, etc. Likewise with the partitions. The second 0 refers to the partiton number.

Hope this helps.

[dborjal007]

Hi John,

Thank you for your reply. My current partition set is as follows:

My C: (internal) is my primary windows drive.

My G: (mobile caddie) is my Ubuntu Linux drive.

The primary windows drive is using NTFS file system and I don't recall what Linux is using. The version of windows I have is Windows XP Pro SP2 and it is a custom built system, so there is no hidden partition for recovery.

I will try the suggest manual boot to see if that helps.

Many thanks,

Dan

[dborjal007]

Well, I solved the problem by starting all over again. I moved my drives around and got some additional caddie trays. Install Windows and Ubuntu onto two separate drives.

[lotuseclat79]

Hi dborjal007,

Although Ubuntu 7.10 includes iptables (firewall), it does not activate unless it is given rules upon booting up the system. You can choose to install Firestarter and configure it, or have a look at my threads in this forum with iptables in the title - use the Advanced Search (note: ignore the nuts and bolts tutorial unless you are an advanced user) where there is a Beginner's tutorial that has a setup that is very secure, although I recommend commenting out interfaces like bittorent and emule (if you do not use them) in the firewall.bash script. A good recommendation is to install the nmap and nmapfe tool, and scan all (65535) of your ports on localhost (i.e. default name of local computer). If nmap cannot see them, then they are stealthed against a network scan used by miscreants on the Internet.

-- Tom