Booting questions

I want to test Xubuntu on an old laptop and I know that there is a lengthy process in getting the WIFI working. Basically I need to install and mess around with it to see if it works properly.

If i wipe the XP partition on my laptop and install xubuntu from scratch then if i decide i want to go back and reinstall windows on the whole drive will the boot sequence be like before or does this cause problems?

If i dual boot then remove windows by deleting its partition, does GRUB still appear? Or do i boot straight into xubuntu.

Lets say i do the above and then need windows again, can i repartition and dual boot xp?

I know this is confusing so please let me know where i can clarify!

Thanks!

 

1.You can try the live cd to see if the wifi card works well with xbuntu. If not search around linux forums to find installation guide right with your card.
2.If you reinstall the window xp on the whole drive, the window would probably format it and install itself. So format is the answer --> It would go back to the original before you installed the xbuntu, except the files and your things on the hard drive.
3.Deleting partion or Formating it? either way you can remove the windows but little clearfication woiuld help. Anyway, Grub will be fine since it is part of the xbuntu, but if you boot into linux from the windows boot screen, then you would need to use live to cd to make the Grub default again. You would find more help on that on the ubuntu forums.
4.If either it was deleted or reformatted, it would show as another partition or free space, so precede as usual on installing of xp. Dual booting is the little tricky, but as i mentioned above, ubuntu forum would have solution to that, but i am sure you can use BCD, live cd, or something like that to bring the linux back to the booting menu.

i hope this helps you

 

Sometimes. There's a lot of WiFi HW that is supported "out of the box" with the latest versions of many Linux distros, including Ubuntu. It's all dependent on the WiFi HW.

Typically most Linux distributions will install a boot loader program, like the GRand Unified Bootloader, or GRUB, program. What the installation of GRUB does is copy the small GRUB program to the boot sector of your hard drive. Then when your computer boots, your computer normally loads the program present on the boot sector of the HD, and if it's GRUB, GRUB will provide a simple menu of installed OS kernels to load. Obviously GRUB doesn't install the OS kernels, or partition your HD. It is just a way of providing a program to choose an installed OS kernel to load at boot time. That's why you need to partition your HD, install your OS, and then configure GRUB with the appropriate OS kernel and partition number information. Some Linux distributions can streamline this process by doing this configuration of GRUB automatically, as part of the installation process. Though manually configuring GRUB is pretty easy, once the terminology is understood.

If you were to wipe your hard drive and only install Xubuntu, then you would still need a boot loader (every OS uses one), and would probably install GRUB as part of the installation process. With only 1 OS on your HD, then you would have a small GRUB menu to choose from, but it would still work the way it does for multiple OS installations. Which is your computer boots, loads GRUB, you choose your OS kernel, and then GRUB loads the OS kernel. If you erased your HD when you were done with Xubuntu, and then installed Windows, the Windows installation program would install both the OS, as well as it's own boot loader program into the boot sector of the HD, which typically does not give you a choice of what OS to load, simply loads Windows upon bootup. So the short answer to your question is that if you wipe a HD and install Windows, it should boot Windows just like a fresh install would, i.e. no GRUB bootloader, just the normal Windows boot screen.

Removing your OS, and/or partition, on a HD, will typically NOT change the boot sector of the HD, where your boot loader is installed. So in a configuration where GRUB is the boot loader program, and is correctly installed in the boot sector, removing any OS will not stop GRUB from being the first thing that loads. If it were your Windows partition that was removed, then it would probably not affect your boot process at all, (except your choice of booting Windows from the GRUB menu would no longer work for obvious reasons).

However, this can cause problems for users who remove their Linux partitions from their dual boot systems for the following reason. GRUB is a multi-stage program with only a section of code installed in the boot sector, which then loads another part, (or stage), of the program which is typically installed into your Linux's /boot directory, in a subdirectory called grub. If you were to remove the partition that contained the /boot directory, then rebooting your computer would result in GRUB not being able to find it's next "stage". People who see this usually remove their Linux partition, which includes their /boot and /boot/grub directories, but still have the GRUB bootloader code installed in the HDD boot sector. So when they reboot the computer they will get a GRUB Error 15: file not found, error message, because the GRUB configuration files were deleted along with its partition. BTW, this is NOT true for ALL Linux distros. Gentoo, which I run, recommends a small /boot partition separate from the main / (root) partition, which is how my laptops are configured. If I were to remove my main Linux partition, GRUB would still boot and be able to load it's next stage from disk. Anyway fixing this situation where one would want to get a Windows only booting environment "restored", means performing a simple procedure to restore the Windows bootloader code to the boot sector of the HDD. It usually involves performing a boot from a Windows CD and running the fixmbr.exe program from the command line.

BTW, among the many configuration options in GRUB, is a default boot option, and a time to select. So you can set GRUB to automatically boot 1 OS kernel after a set time period. I have mine set to boot Linux after 5 seconds. If you need it to "automatically" boot an OS kernel, you could set it to 1 second to quickly boot a specific OS kernel. Documentation on all of GRUB's configuration is maintained here.

You can always reinstall OSes, and then setup GRUB to give you the choice of booting different OS kernels. However, you should know that when you do a Windows install, Windows assumes it owns the boot sector of the HD. So a Windows install always installs the Windows boot loader in the boot sector, and the Windows boot loader always boots right into Windows, ignoring all other OS kernels and partitions on the HD. That's why the best advice you read about setting up a dual boot Linux/Windows setup is to install the Windows OS first, (and it will of course install its boot loader), and second install Linux. As part of the Linux install process it will install a boot loader (nowadays it's usually GRUB), and overwrite the Windows boot loader. That way your boot loader can be configured to give you OS boot choices, upon bootup. If you ran into a situation where that was impossible, and after reinstalling Windows, you "lost" GRUB, you could always use a good tool like Super Grub Disk, to fix the situation and reinstall GRUB to your HD's boot sector.

Lastly, this information is generally accurate, but there's much more to bootloaders, GRUB, Windows booting, partitioning and recovery, than I covered here, including lots of technical " ratholes". I thought in the interests of answering the questions you specifically asked, I would present the general information as best I could. In case you want to really dig into this, in addition to reading the GRUB related information above, you can read about Windows and it's own boot loader program, which can be configured to boot different OSes;

Windows XP
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How to edit the Boot.ini file in Windows XP
How to Use and Edit Boot.ini in Windows XP

Windows Vista
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Boot Configuration Data in Windows Vista
EasyBCD by NeoSmart Technologies (best graphical tool for managing the Vista bootloader)

Good Luck..

 

The Master Boot Record (MBR) does not have sufficient space to contain the whole of GRUB. GRUB is a multi-stage bootloader, it uses a technique called bootstrapping to load a small program from the MBR, this small program then loads in another stage of GRUB. The second stage of GRUB, the one that displays the menu, is typically stored in the linux partition under /boot/grub, so if instead of deleting the Windows partition you were to delete the linux partition then the system would fail to boot.

There is also a stage1.5 that is required to be able to read the filesystem that the stage2 GRUB program is installed on. I think this is normally installed on the sectors following the 1st sector on the hard drive.