[d0od]

Hey y'all, already have Ubuntu installed on it's own HDD, however, though i have a separate drive i've tried installing Vista on, no comprendez!

formatting/partitioning/etc but it still always says 'windows cannot install itself to this partition/harddrive' or somesuch.

Now, i did swap the HD's around in the bios and tried again, but still no movement. what makes it tres annoying is that my Vista DVD (for some reason) is read sooo slowly, so it takes about 15 mintues from putting it in to getting to the partition bit, if not longer.

Any advice on what i'm doing wrong? I guess it's something to do with active or primary partitions? All the hard drives in the Vista partition manager were labeled 'primary'... hmm

[Mike0001]

Sorry, I am a bit muddled here. Let me get it straight.

(a) you have two internal HDDs
(b) one (A) is the primary and has Ubuntu on it
(c) The other (B) is secondary and you want to put Vista on

Correct? If so, take a copy of menu.lst on a medium that is readable from Vista.

If possible, change the grub config so that the boot loader is on the root partition, not the MBR.

Remove A, make B primary and install Vista. If necessary, use Ubuntu to format B as NTFS or Fat32 beforehand.

Install Vista and get grub4dos and unpack it.

Move the file grldr to the root of drive C:

Change your bootup options by adding a new option:

[boot loader]
...
[operating systems]
c:\grldr="Grub"
...

Now copy the menu.lst file from your Ubuntu config to the root of C:, and edit it so it looks something like this:

title Failsafe -- openSUSE 11.0 - 2.6.25.18-0.2
root (hd1,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.25.18-0.2-pae root=/dev/disk/by-id/usb-HTS54101_0G9AT00_503EA-0:0-part2 showopts ide=nodma apm=off acpi=off noresume nosmp noapic maxcpus=0 edd=off x11failsafe
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.25.18-0.2-pae

title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
chainloader (hd0,0)+1


title openSUSE usb
rootnoverify (hd1,1)
chainloader (hd1,1)+1

Mine is openSUSE but yours will be similar. Any occurrences of (hd0 will now be (hd1 of course in the first option. The second goes back and boots the Vista drive. The third boots the grub boot loader on the Ubuntu drive.