Installing Win XP, Ubuntu and Fedora

[Aarian]

Hello all,

 

I still have this spare netbook that's still running Windows XP, but it's wise to replace it with something else.

 

So I made four partitions and I reinstalled Windows XP on the first. On the second and third I installed Fedora Linux and Ubuntu Linux, mainly to see which of the two I like best. The fourth partition is for data. I installed a separate boot manager. I didn't use Grub, because that gave severe headaches in the past.

 

The problem is ... Ubuntu and Fedora are not willing to boot. (All I get is a black screen after booting either of them.) Both had been installed property, but they don't seem to like it if they're being started by a boot manager they don't know ...

 

If anyone knows of partition software, i.e. something that can hide partitions, I'd also love to hear.

 

Any suggestions?

 

Aarian.

[+ deej]

I gave up on boot managers several years ago preferring virtual machines. Mostly because moving between them is a click instead of a shutdown/boot sequence, but also because you can copy/paste between them.

[+ deej]

In my case my primary OS is Mac OS X. Using Parallels I have three different versions of Windows and a Linux distro running as VMs. The cool thing about Parallels, that I haven't seen on other platforms, is that the VPCs have access to the host disks and peripherals.

 

On a Windows box, you could use VMWare or MS VPC. (I haven't looked recently, but MS VPC used to be a free download.) There are others, but these are the most common.

 

The principle is the same either way: pick a primary boot OS, install the VPC software and then create a new VPC for each of the other OSes. If I'm setting up a VPC for "messing around" I'll usually do the messing around on a *copy* of the VPC so that when I've messed it up I can just delete it and make a fresh new copy.

 

You should really retire Windows XP by the way. It's no longer supported, no longer getting security updates, and getting more and more vulnerable by the day.