I've been hearing a ton of hype about ubuntu recently, and thought to myself over the weekend, I might setup a dual boot system and check it out for myself.

It comes with a liveCD (I've been a fan of gentoo in the past, and love the idea of liveCD's) which booted up nicely, and pretty soon I had the ubuntu desktop looking at me.

After playing around for a bit with the liveCD, I decided I would hit the 'install' button on the desktop - too easy! It went through a bunch of settings with me, and came to creating a partition table. This is where things got hairy. I was quite happy to setup my partitions myself  since XP was already installed on its own 25gb partition and I was going to setup a shared fat32 drive as well. I assigned ubuntu 25gb, as well as 2gb swap. Everything went to plan, and it happily installed while I went to grab a coffee!

Once it was done, I restarted and was greeted with a "GRUB ERROR 17", grub is obviously the bootloader, and error 17 means that it cannot determine the type of filesystem. Upon further inspection I noticed a few odd things, it seems ubuntu had overwritten the windows XP boot record, and the grub menu.lst file had entries pointing to the wrong drive (a drive that doesn't exist!).

To get -something- working I loaded my XP cd and ran "fixmbr" to replace the master boot record, and things started working again. I spent another few hours messing around with boot flags, drives and just could not get rid of the error 17 every time i attempted to load grub. At a loose end currently, but I'm sort of disapointed considering it's supposed to be such a user friendly distro, dual booting is a very common 'want' and should be a smooth process. Maybe I'll try again in the future, but it just got too frustrating in the end.