How I did it: Well, Vista died. The laptop used to boot Ubuntu as well, but some combination of Karmic/grub2/EasyBCD/Radeon gfx card means that Ubuntu doesn't boot either.

So, downloaded Ubuntu Karmic liveCD, cleared out the old install and made a fresh install with a separate /boot partition. Also installed grub to the MBR - could be overkill, but if I go back to dualbooting I don't want grub to live in the MBR...

Karmic works lovely on my laptop (1year4months old) It even tells me how badly I need to replace my disk, how hot it is, how many bad sector it has, and all that. Which means I should dig out that warrantry (asus worldwide 2 years, they say!) and see if they will replace it!

It is relatively easy to me now, but I only installed Ubuntu for the first time in August 2008. However now at work I look after a small cluster of dual boot machines in my group, which uses Debian and I learned a lot more technical stuff that I would not know otherwise.

Still need to actually back up the disk -- old external harddisk has only 12GB left, which is not enough. Still, I think (hope) that I know enough about linux now that I could stay in it without resorting back to Windows, and that's a good feeling!

Lessons & tips: If you can, break it up and don't try to achieve too much in one day.
It really helps to have a secondary computer that you can experiment on. Alternatively, have a secondary computer that you can fall back on if your primary one fails. I was lucky in a way that I have the small cluster of computers to work around on, even though they are work/production machines there's more than one of them!

Resources:

• real people who I can ask about specific problems I am having and know my specific system --- again I am very lucky, I know!
• mailing lists and interest groups
• Google!!!!!
• Ubuntu, Debian, Crunchbang

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Dec 26, 2009, 07:39PM PST | 0 comments | 2 cheers