[themusicalduck]

Hey,

I'm trying to set up a dual-boot with Ubuntu and XP64. Initially I just had Ubuntu on my one sata hdd and XP on an ide hdd. I decided it'd be better running XP on the sata drive too, so I resized my linux partition with gparter, and created a new NTFS partition.

The problem is, when I try to install XP onto the drive, it cannot seem to see the sata drive. Nothing was listed at all except the ide drives and my usb drive.

I did some looking and found the 64 bit sata drivers for my motherboard, managed to load them onto a floppy and load them into the XP setup. This was all fine again until the time to select a partition, where it seemed to list the drive, but only shows 'Unknown disk' 'There is no disk in the drive'.

I tried deleting the partition I made with gparter to see if XP could at least see the 'unallocated space' but to no avail.

I even tried making a boot disk in nLite with the sata drivers, but it made no difference (not really surprisingly)

If I try to use the 32 bit drivers that came with my mobo, it won't let me install XP.

I'm all out of ideas to why it won't work.

[shinybeast]

Hello musicalduck,

I don't think you can do what you want. When you put XP and Linux on the same drive, you want to install xp first on the first partition, then ubuntu on another partition(s). I have a dual boot setup like that. To put XP on the SATA drive you would have to delete partitions and start over.

[themusicalduck]

It seems odd that XP wouldn't be able to recognise a partition because linux was installed on the same drive, but if it's the only way then I'll probably do that.

If I were to make a backup of my home folder, is that likely to keep most of the tweaks and theme settings I'll have done since installing linux?

[shinybeast]

Windows XP will recognize it, Windows XP Setup will not. Setup looks at the first partition, NTFS? FAT32? Nope. Not installing there. Next.

Most of your settings are in the home folder. You may have to redo some. You will have to reinstall any packages you've added. That stuff is a bit beyond what I'm comfortable giving advice for. I've never tried to restore anything to a new Linux installation. I just wipe it out and start over. I think I like to manually redo all my settings and packages just to keep their locations and options a little fresher in my mind since it is rare that I actually do it. You may want to post your question in the linux forum. You'd definitely get a better answer. Good luck.

[themusicalduck]

Coming back again to this problem, I have now deleted linux and I'm planning to reinstall both onto my sata drive.

Though for some reason Windows will still not recognise my drive while the drive is in sata mode. The only way I could get the drive to work before was by disabling the 'raid' option under serial ata 1 and serial ata 2 in my bios. Then the drive is recognised by the bios as an IDE drive.

When the raid function is enabled then the drive is not recognised at all.

What I'm wondering is if my hard drive is not compatible with the nforce4 sata drivers? and I have to use the SiL, slightly slower drivers? Since these problems started happening after I switched my drive over to the faster ports.. I don't know much about sata drives in general, so I don't know if it makes a difference or not.

Also a live disc of linux will not recognise the disk while in sata mode, so it definitely seems to be a problem there.

EDIT: on further inspection the live cd can actually see the drive with raid enabled if I look it up in the partition editor and it will let me create partitions on there with access to the partitions too :/ It definitely seems to be a problems with windows setup. I'm loading all the relevant drivers using my floppy drive so I can't see where the problem must be..