Hello,
Last Black Friday, I got the Lenovo 3000 desktop that was on sale at Office Depot. I'm not at my house right now so I can't get further details. I'll fill in later if this does not seem like enough info to get me any help.
This desktop came with a 500GB SATA HD. I added a 400GB HD for linux, so no repartitioning should be needed. I just install to sdb and put the boot loader (GRUB) on the MBR of sda, right? wrong.
I have installed linux on many machines before, but this one has me beat. Apparently, Vista has its own boot loader or something and does not allow GRUB to stick around.
Soooo.... I read on a techie site (I think ZDnet) that the best solution in this case is to leave Vista on the original HDD, then swap the two drives so the empty is sda and Vista is on sdb, then install linux to the new sda and the boot loader to the MBR of that drive. Configure the boot loader to swap the drive mapping so Vista doesn't get all sulky and pouty about not being first in line.
I tried this and it SEEMED to work during install time. Unfortunately, rebooting threw an error about a disk protection system and would not allow me to even get to the boot loader, much less either OS. Swapping the drives back restored Vista's operability, but now I can't get GRUB to install anywhere that I can get to at boot time.... hence, no linux.
I have gotten hints that this disk protection stuff is mostly for laptops and does a quick-park or something to avoid head crashes in a fall situation. If so, I don't know WHAT its doing on a desktop.
Can anyone offer a way around this or a way to diable this apparently silly protection?
My end goal is to dual boot with Vista on one SATA drive and Kubuntu or openSuSE on the other SATA drive.
Thanks for any help. It will save my marriage.