Breezy & WinXP dual boot on Dell Dimension 8400 (SATA RAID)

[Phillip Susi]

Sean Hammond wrote:
> I'm looking into installing Ubuntu Breezy to dual-boot for a family 
> member. The computer in question is a very fancy Dell Dimension 8400 
> (http://reviews.cnet.com/Dell_Dimension_8400/4507-3118_7-30919189.html) 
> currently with Windows XP installed and taking up all the disc space.
> 
> I noticed the machine has a Serial ATA-150 hard disk interface, suspect 
> there might be some sort of fakeraid thing at work here (the specs page 
> linked above says storage controller type: RAID, storage controller RAID 
> level: raid 0, raid 1).
> 

As long as it doesn't actually use the raid ( i.e. it only has one drive 
in it ) everything should just work.  This is probably the case.  Look 
inside the case to make sure.

> A friend of mine previously tried to install Breezy dual boot on a 
> machine with SATA fakeraid and it didn't work (or at least the Ubuntu 
> installer didn't immediately detect his fakeraid partitions and it was 
> too much work for him to try and he quickly gave up). That was a 
> completely different machine though.
> 

Did he read my howto on that subject?

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FakeRaidHowto

Hopefully dapper will support this out of the box.

> So out of interest I booted the breezy install CD to see what disks it 
> would detect. The guided partitioner offerred me two install options - 
> both were to erase the entire disk, one of them was to use LVM, the 
> other not. So the guided options are not an option.
> 

<snip>

> 
> SCSI1 (0,0,0) (sda) - 160.0GB ATA ST3160023AS
> 
>    #1 primary 65.8Mb fat16 /media/sda1
>    #2 primary 156.9Gb ntfs /media/sda2
>    #3 primary 3.1Gb fat32 /media/sda3
> 

Looks like the machine only has a single disk and thus, isn't using raid 
at all.

> When booted into Windows XP, in the My Computer dialogue, only one disk 
> is shown, an ntfs disk which it says is of size 146Gb. So there seems to 
> be a bit of a discrepancy but I suspect the partition Windows XP shows 
> me is the #2 partition from the Ubuntu installer. Not sure what the 
> other two are, but suspect they're something to do with this RAID setup.
> 

Dell likes to put those little hidden fat partitions on their machines. 
  They basically contain Dell system repair software that you can choose 
to boot into if windows gets completely hosed up.  I'm not sure what is 
up with the third partition.  If you can switch to a console ( try 
hitting alt+right arrow to cycle through the consoles ) and look at the 
output of fdisk -l, that might help.

> So what I would want to do is to shrink that huge partition #2 and 
> install Ubuntu in the space made. I don't want to break XP and its RAID 
> partitions in the process, or prevent XP from booting, or anything.
> 

It doesn't look like raid is being used, and usually the normal install 
process will offer to shrink down the existing partition and install to 
the free space.  Not sure why it didn't offer to do that for you.

> So... can anyone tell me if it is safe to use the Ubuntu installer here?
> 
> Has anyone dealt with Breezy dual-booting on a machine like this before?
> 

Yes... I installed it on my brother's new computer last week.  Just 
accepted all the defaults and it resized the windows partition and 
installed to the free space.  It was also a dell with two existing 
partitions ( the main one and the hidden repair one ).

> Can anyone tell me any more about what the Ubuntu installer is telling me?
> 
> And exactly how should I go about doing the install, just use the 
> advanced partitioner to shrink that one partition and make the Ubuntu 
> partitions in the space created? Or do I need to use one of the 
> Configure RAID or configure LVM options?
> 

You do NOT want to set up raid or LVM, that will destroy the existing 
data.  If it offers to shrink the existing partition and use the free 
space, that's the option you want.

Oh, and just to make sure, open the case and verify that it only has a 
single hard disk.