Inspiron 1520 Triple Boot

Hello all! Any help on my project here would be very much appreciated!!

My goal: Have Windows XP Pro, Vista Ultimate, Ubuntu 7.10, and MediaDirect all on one system, my Inspiron 1520.

Current Setup: 110MB Diagnostics / 10GB Recovery / 136.4GB Vista Ultimate / 2.50GB Media Direct Partitions.

Questions:

1.) Can I simply remove the included diagnostics and recovery partitions, shrink the Vista Partition to create:

[[ 10 GB Ubuntu / 116GB Vista Ultimate / 20 GB XP / 2.50 GB Media Direct ]]

---- Will this screw up Media Direct? If not, great. How should I go about installing the other two OSes? If it DOES screw up Media Direct, what should I do?

---- If Mediadirect is too much to ask, I don't care. Can I simply have 3 partitions, and somehow disable the Media Direct button?

or...

2.) Do you have better ideas?

Please keep in mind that I would rather not mess with my current Vista Ultimate Installation.

I'm trying to make this as smooth as possible...I'm not really clear on the rules of partitions and MBRs in relation to MediaDirect, boot loaders, etc.

Thanks for your help!

 

All I can say is good luck! That's quite a project.

 

I have been researching much the same for my 1720, just minus the Ubuntu partition.

The major question I still have as well is can Vista and XP share a MediaDirect partition?

I have learned that MediaDirect 3.3 is NOT compatible with XP, according to this thread, post #217: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=84071&page=22

So, then, what version of MediaDirect is compatible with both XP and Vista? 3.2?

In the interest of preserving the Dell OEM setup, I just ordered a second hard drive, and will just install a copy of XP Pro and a compatible MediaDirect there. I aim to just disable the first hard drive in the BIOS when I want to use my XP install, and enable it when I want the glossiness of Vista . . .

Let me know what else you find out! MediaDirect is the real showstopper, it seems . . .

-J

 

i tried it....decided to quit. (Vista, SUSE, MediaDirect)

the way that the In-VISTA installer for Media Direct finds the partition is that it is the last logical on the disk, but that didn't work for me at boot up, it seemed that the BIOS used a different method.

also, Dell's MBR extends past 512 bytes (first sector) (which has the standard windows MBR), and goes into the area between the mbr and first partition, which contains your service tag, and i THINK the mbr for booting media direct...or not.

the real biggie i have with media direct is that i couldn't find the battery meter. lol. maybe i missed it.

 

Ok...So... Let's say, forget MediaDirect. This Time:

Goal: [[ 10GB Ubuntu // 118GB Vista // 20 GB XP

So, I'll do the partitioning, install XP, then install Ubuntu, and fix the bootloader so I can boot between the three. (I am familiar with all of these steps.)

Let's assume I'm done. Someone comes along and hits the MediaDirect Button. What happens?

I'm worried, as others have called this the " self-destruct" button.

 

I think the "self-destruct button" problem only happens if you have Media Direct installed and it tries to access something on what it thinks is the Vista Partition when it isn't there. I'm not positive about that though.

Anyway, Tex1ntux had a fix if you run into that problem:

That's from this thread
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=2510999

 

Thanks...!

Hmm... It looks like I might be doing trial and error.... but, I'm not afraid.

I'll probably start on this tomorrow.

...Unless anyone is going to say... "STOP! Do this instead!"

 

you should also boot debian, and MacOS... duh.

 

If you nuke Media direct and have a program that clones partitions (Seagate DiskWizard is free if you have a seagate disk) you could try this:

1) backup your Vista partition with DiskWizard
2) delete everything but the first partition.
3) build the following

1. existent primary partition DELL diag
2. Vista primary partition
3. XP primary partition
4. extended partition with the following logical volues
   • a) NTFS for programs
   • b) NTFS for higly fragmented data (internet caches, mail...)
   • c) NTFS for your personal data
   • d) FAT32 partition to exchange data with Linux
   • e) EXT3 (or reiserfs) for UBUNTU /
   • f) linux swap
   • g) EXT3 for UBUNTU /home
   • h) other EXT3 partitions for other linux installations (OSX, anyone? ), and for linux data

4) Then I would install XP,
5) Then install Vista that will take care of the boot for XP.
6) Save the boot data from the new vista (I do not know how to, but I think the net has an answer ready)
7) I will then restore the old Vista partition and either
-restore the boot data
-or use EasyBCD to take care of the boot option for XP (the previous install of Vista might not be necessary but I take it the boot loader is in the MBR and won't be affected by the change in Vista's partition)

8) Once Vista and XP are functional (google for the dual boot guide, it's exceptional) I would install Linux in a logical partition and instruct the installer to place GRUB on that partition and NOT in the MBR.

9) After that, It is straightforward to modify Vista's bootloader with EasyBCD in order to add the option for Linux: it will boot GRUB and then Linux (you could set the timeout to 0 seconds, if you wish).

Ok, you're done.
In less than 10 steps!!!

But if I were you, I'd save my data and then I'd reinstall Vista from scratch in a smaller partition. Points 1-5-7 won't be necessary, and you'll end up with a better system, IMO.

 

I will be getting my laptop today but I will be going home only after 2 weeks.... In that weekend I will be playing around with all the partitioning stuff.... My aim is something similar to yours :

Vista + OpenSuse + MediaDirect without doing an entire clean format

If you ask me MediaDirect is the problem here because of its stupid stringent requirements of residing at the last partition of the hard drive and that too as a only single logical partition in the extended partition.... This also causes problem when you need to create more number of partitions.... Anyway I'll be trying that time and let you know abt it....

 

This is looking more and more like the best option. I've been meaning to get an external HD for awhile now anyway, so I think I'll backup my important documents, etc. and then start from scratch with only that Dell diagnostics partition (most threads around here advise to just leave it alone). This way, If I mess up at any time, it'll only be time lost, right?

Thanks Sredni Vashtar, for taking the time to think through all of that!

Does this mean if I follow the steps in the last post, my media direct button will boot the last partition, giving me grub? Or, since the last partition will be an extended partition containing many logical volumes, will it do something to mess up my bootloader on that partition?

If it just boots from there, with my linux loader, that's great...

 

a short question from my side:
how does media direct identify its partition?

my experience:
I shrunked C:OS and allocated the new space into the extended partition (where the Media Direct patition is). The MD Partition was at the exact same position as it was before (sector 307337216) just the OS partition changed a bit cos I got 4MB unallocated space before it for some reason.
result: MediaDirect started (without running OS) but couldn't access the harddrive and terminated. Also the functions of MD Button and On/Off button got a bit out of control.

Then I moved the MD-P. around a bit with the result that MD says "MediaDirect partition missin".

Hence it seems to me, that MD finds its partition just if it is exactly at the same place as it used to be.
It even gets confused when the position of OS changes.
Obviously its different when the OS is running...

Any experiences from your side concerning that topic?

 

This is a question I've asked at least three times in this forum, but got no answers. All I know is that on the Media Direct cd there is an utility rmbr that allows you to set the partition from which media direct has to boot, but it's unclear whether that partition (identified by a single number N) has to be the Nth primary partition, or the Nth partition considering every type of filesystem, or only those recognized by M$. I have a bunch of partitions and I don't want to go by trial and error: I'd like to know what I'm doing.

I tried to find some more informations about the program rmbr on the CD, but to no avail.

Here are some threads with different methods:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=103281
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=172162
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=145033

This seems to have more information

http://caffeinbar.com/wp/2007/03/08/start-linux-with-dell-mediadirect-button/

If you're gonna do some experimentation... we could use you as a lab rabbit

 

hi there and thanks for your post. I still couldn't figure out how MD identifies its partition. It seems the partition has to be the last, but mine is the last and isn't found.

Me as a lab rabbit? I do not know. I don't have the time and knowledge I believe

It can't be that difficult to have 1. diagnose utilities 2. os 3. data 4. linux and 5. MD can it?
I would think this problem occurs very often and there is no official way of doing this?!

 

The problem is that in the partition table there is room for 4 partitions only.
So either you have 4 primary partitions (diag, os, linux, MD - hence no data nor recovery partitions) or you can have 3 primary partition and an extended partition into which accomodate the honest OSes that can be loaded from a logical volume (i.e. NOT Winduh).
You could then have 3 primary partitions (Diag, OS, MD) and an extened partition with: (one or more Linux partitions, linux swap, data for Win, data for Linux).

So, yes you could still have Media direct as the last primary partition. But is it that that gets booted?

Right now on my system I have

1. Dell DIAG
2. Recovery
3. VISTA
4. extended partition
   • Linux1 (with Kanotix)
   • Linux2 (waiting for Ubuntu or Slackware)
   • Swap
   • 6 logical NTFS volumes
   • 1 FAT32 volume (for data exchange)
   • 6 ext3 partitions

I think I could have easily left MD and sacrificed the recovery partition. But I want to boot linux with the MD button. I just need the last piece of information so that I can place another GRUB in the correct place.

 

On your 160GB HD, what size partitions are you using for each one of those?

Also, if you have 2GB of RAM, why do you need a Swap partition? I've only used Swap partitions on machines with less than a GB of RAM.

Well I can confirm that. I've already deleted the MD partition and it disables the MD button above your keyboard.


_

 

The two linux partitions are around 4 GB each.
Swap is less than 1 GB, I like to have it nontheless.

Most partition are in the 2-4 GB range; the fat32 exchange partition is around 1 GB, I do not expect to pass nothing bigger than a few MB, though.
And I do not have multimedia fancies.
Right now, though, the Vista partition is taking some 72 GB because in Redmond they still think to be at the center of the world. There are files at the end of the partition that can't be moved and prevent further shrinking.

I wanto to shrink it to 20 GB and reclaim that space for other things. The bad thing is that I'll have to delete and then re-create every single partition I have in order to use that space in the extended partition. Thank you Microsoft, for wasting my time.
[/QUOTE]

 

i managed to shrink Vista partition to 60GB and I could have gone further, try gparted in that case.

I want:
- Utility
- Vista
- Data
-Linux
- MD

I know that there is a limit of 4 primary partitions. And I moved space into the extended partition and it would have worked, but it made that my MD can't find its partition anymore / or couldn't access the hard drive.
If that would work, that would be perfect. I just need to know, how I can tell MD where to boot from and how to access the harddrive. Or I need a way of freezing partitions so that they don't get moved, no matter what.

 

Ok wimme I found one info from this thread :

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=559378

Type this command after booting from the MD3 CD :

setupmd /diskno=xx /logno=yy /type=87

where xx is disk no (first disk 0), yy is the logical partition where mediadirect is installed (first logical partition is 1)

 

Ok, well I still don't see the benefit. Swap files are essential for older hardware using less than 1GB of RAM. One typically doubled the size of your swap partition in proportion to the RAM you have. No offense, but for newer machines using a GB of RAM or more, I really don't see the purpose.

Ahh, but that's partly why I don't have Vista, my friend.

That's also why I got my new Dell with XP. Makes life a little simpler.

However, You can blame Michael Dell for the MD partition. That one's his.

I know a lot of people don't want to spend the money, but I believe the MD partition can be moved with Acronis or Norton. However I don't know what it's effects will be in terms of the MD button or where the boot sequence is concerned. Deleting it altogether may wind up being the trade-off if it can't be moved and made to function properly.

Again, I fully recommend getting some 3rd party partitioning software that's compatible with Vista (or XP) and doing it from there. Anytime I've moved large amounts of data (using Partition Magic) from one partition to another, it forces me to reboot the machine and go into CHKDSK mode whereby I can actually see the migration of files from one partition to another. It does it pretty well, too.

 

I'm a little bit retro, I must admit. ;-)
And it's less than 1% of my disk space, hence it's not a big deal if it's useless.

I tried to get mine with XP, but to no avail. I managed to get VIsta business so that I can downgrade it when I want. And that's the reason I am shrinking the OS partition.

I deleted Mediadirect before my laptop was 10 days old.
Now I found the way to shrink Vista's bloated partition as low as 15 GB: I had to
- remove the hibernate file
- remove system restore
- disable the pagefile, and deleting pagefile.sys at reboot
- disable memory dump
AND
- use Diskperfect 8.0 trial to defrag the disk in boot mode.

That last one made the trick.
Neither Ausologic nor JKdefrag were able to move the dreadful MTF files at the end of the partition.

I chose to give Vista 25 GB (will be inherithed by XP - but I'm still torn: should I give it "only" 20GB? It's getting some 13-14 GB right now)

Now I have to wipe every single bloody partition I've created so far, If I want to move that space into the extended partition. It's no big problem, since I did n't place anything important in them. Only a small annoyance since I have to reinstall Linux again. Oh well, but wasting time is normal when there's a M$ OS around.

 

I don't know where your located at, but here in the U.S. the Vostro 1500 has XP as an option and believe it or not, Microsoft has allowed manufacturers like Dell & HP to continue selling XP until early next year. Of course they may be pressured to extend it again if enough people scream about it, but even if Microsoft refuses to do that, that means they have to support XP until 2014, which means I can probably bypass Vista altogether.

I did all that to the machine the first day I got it. I do it to all my Windows machines.

When you mean "boot mode", you mean "safe mode", right?

15GB is a good size for the XP OS partition. I'm probably going to create a secondary NTFS partition for files and documents created in XP.

What I'd like to do is keep it simple. Partition size is approximate:

15GB XP OS
45GB extended NTFS partition
7GB for "/" (the Linux root ext3 or reiserfs partition)
53GB for "/home" (the Linux home directory ext3 or reiserfs partition)
no Swap

The only thing I'm confused about is which ones beyond the XP OS partition I will create as either "primary" or "extended" drives.

I think it's a good idea to plan all this ahead of time and ask people before I mess something up, which I've done mightly in the past.

 

Here in India - they charge Rs. 1000 or so extra for getting XP instead of Vista Home Premium

 

Hi!

My setup right now is:

dell diag 110mb
xp 10gb
vista 20gb
extended data 38gb
extended data 78gb
MD 2.5gb

I have dual-boot to choose between vista and xp in the startup.
In vista, the MD button starts up the media direct window.
In XP, from the start-menu, i can startup the media direct window, however, by reading in this forum, i havent yet dared to press the md button in xp, or to press it when powered up.

I'm going to a LAN-party in a few hours, so i rather not mess up the settings right now, but after the LAN, i will try out the button, to see if everything is alright.

What do you think? Will pressing the md-button when powered off mess up the partition table?

 

So far, I've got

dell diag 110mb.
xp 10gb
vista ~136gb
MD 2.5gb

I haven't gotten around to my next step of installing ubuntu, nor have I pressed my mediadirect button.

I'm still planning the best scenario, and I haven't had a good chance to back up all of my data...

 

Not in my country, in Old Europe.

Who knows, maybe at service pack 2, Vista will be able to do the things one expect from an operating system. Right now it's a bunch of eyecandy (not even customizable out of the box: I can't change the darn color set of my windows. I have to revert back to the windows classic theme to do that! And I have yet to figure out how to customize the start menu: right now it has no structure), with a lot - and I do mean A LOT - of hidden work in background, nobody can be sure about what it's doing (during my 'restyling' I disabled shadow copy, system restore, hiberantion, paging, indexing, I took away all the program from the startup menu, disabled a bunck of services including Defender, Firewall, unistalled the antivirus... and the disk was still working in the background like there's no tomorrow. What the heck is it doing?).

I guess so. The program call that boot mode (IIRC). Basically it's just like running from DOS with Windows98: the system reboots, Windows does not load and the dfrag program takes control in order to work on files normally used by windows.

Right now I've hit the 15 partition barrier set by Linux. I needed some 6-9 more partitions to organize my files and programs in the best way. Darn SCSI disk. I wish I had an eide disk (I thought I had one, but it seems that sata are trated as Scsi : (). For them the limit is 63 partitions.

The Winduh OS on primary partitions. One linux on primary, the rest is in the extended partition.

I'd split the OS from the OS data (programs, desktop, application data, temp) and from the user data (what you create). In this way should the OS partition die you could still have, for example, all your emails, messages to newsgroups, downloaded files on the OS data disk. After reinstalling the OS you should only have to fix a few things to have it working again.

And I'd still add a FAT32 partition to move to and from. If for some reason the NTFS write ****s up, you're safe. And, yes, I would add at least 512 MB for swap, Linux installers still ask for it. You won'0t even notice it...

 

It's gonna be hard, if you used up all four primary partions.
I had to sacrifice Media Direct. The fact that it died on me the first day I got my laptop helped a lot in taking such a harsh decision

 

Do you have Media direct on a logical volume in the extended partition?
Is it possible that the four primaryt partitions limit belongs to the past?

 

Yeah, you are correct. The media direct is the last logical partition in the extended volume.

 

Well, if vista is a primary partition, you have to shrink it to geto some unallocated space, then...

...o h well I do not know if there are programs that can extened the...extended partition at the left side. It is in principle possible, so you might try: in case of trouble, you could backup media direct's partition, remove it, and rebuild a whole new extended partition with the same media direct last partition.
Creating ext3 (or reiserFS) partitions can be done from a linux livecd. Installing linux is a no brainer once you have all your partition ready. I've just reinstalled Kanotix (I will add ubuntu when Gutsy comes out) and it allows you to choose where to put /, /home and, I guess even /usr and /var should you need to have them on separate partitions.

Too bad there is a that darn 15 partition limit for SCSI disks...

 

Uh, i have no intention of installing linux. I'm a very basic linux user, so i'll stik to xp and vista.
I want Vista / Xp / MD. And no ****ups if you hit the MD-button

 

I'm sorry I've mistaken andrew's comment for yours.