[Cialug] Kubuntu install problem

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 9:01 AM,  <murraymckee at wellsfargo.com> wrote:
> I have two physical disks in my machine.
>        C: is 186Gigs with 7G unallocated
>        E: is 500G with 200 formatted as E: and 300 unallocated
>
> I started the install and it wanted a partition of at least 2 Gigs for
> the software.  I formatted 10G as the default ex3 on the E: drive.  It
> wanted at least 256M for swap space.  I formatted a partition of 2G as
> swap, also on the E: drive.  I also formatted 150G as FAT32.  (Data
> storage for exchange with Windows, I hope.)  I'm assuming that will show
> up as F: when I have windows up.
>
> The install then complained about not having a boot partition.  I
> changed the ex3 partition to ex2 and the install proceeded.

> I rebooted, expecting to see a 'menu' of choices to boot from.  It did
> go through the normal BIOS stuff and then said, "GRUB loading, please
> wait" and then shortly said "ERROR 17".  Nothing happened after that.

> So I powered the computer down and back up and tried booting from the
> Live CD, rather than from the install.  That had given me the choice of
> booting from the hard drive as well as several other choices.
>
> Whether I clicked on booting from the primary local drive or from the
> Live CD the following showed up on my screen.
>
> Booting from local disk. . .
> GRUB loading stage1.5.

In case you're really stuck, it never hurts to check out #cialug on
freenode (irc chat room). There's usually about 10 people in there.
Might be good for live troubleshooting.

This last bit you mentioned about grub loading when you try to boot
off the CD indicates that the computer is not booting from the CD. So
first step is to get that working again. Watch your CD drive, is the
light coming on leading up to the boot process? Check your boot order.

If you have 7G unused on your first drive you may want to strongly
consider installing there and then putting the /home on your second
drive. So maybe use all 7G for your / filesystem, put swap equal to 2x
ram on your second drive and then create a partition for /home on the
second drive. 7G is enough for a normal install with room to spare but
it is easy to outgrow it if you have a lot of personal files. Putting
/home on its own fs avoids this handily. The swap is useful even if
you have plenty of RAM because suspend to disk uses the swap area.

Also, if you use the ext2ifs driver for Windows you don't need a FAT32
intermediary partition. http://www.fs-driver.org/ works very well,
especially when /home is on its own filesystem.

KDE 4 is pretty slick and improving all the time. You can install it
in 7.10 but you may want to consider the upgrade to 8.04. If you're
going that far then you also may want to consider using wubi which can
download and install ubuntu or kubuntu from within Windows without
formatting or partitioning a drive. I realize that at this point it's
too late for that though. :-/

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode