Sweeties, Pies and Ginger

I had my first attempt at creating a dual boot Linux desktop machine last night; for the most part it went smoothly, but it wasn't all plain sailing. I first had to switch disks inside the machine as I didn't want the disk with Windows XP on it to be the main disk. This done I stuck the first Debian Sarge CD into the machine and rebooted.

There is a new installer with the Sarge release and I must admit to it making the whole thing much easier to install. When I installed Debian Woody on another machine over a year ago I had to have a Debian expert with me; I really wouldn't have understood what was going on otherwise.

I did manage to knacker the installation somewhat though, after getting through the initial portion I managed to get Aptitude, a front end to the package management system, into a tizz and had to reboot the machine. Every reboot after that went back to the start of the second phase of installation and since it was late I just gave up.

Also Grub, the GRand Unified Bootloader wouldn't load Windows XP, something about:

Booting 'Microsoft Windows XP Pro'
root (hd1,0)
    Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x7
...

So it wasn't the most successful evenings work, but then again it probably wasn't he best idea to try and install something like this at eleven o'clock at night anyway. So I'll be having another go at some point soon I hope.