The Path to Zen

Dual-booters, beware the XP installer.

About this time last year, I decided to switch to Linux. I lived happily ever after in (K)Ubuntu, with my original Windows still kept around (one word: games). So after upgrading my workhorse desktop at home a couple of weeks back, I had the opportunity to reinstall both OS’s in a dual-boot setup. The experience from the two setup processes was unbelievably radically different.

Let me list the hardware upgrade first so you know what the “players” had to deal with:

1. Replaced P4 3.0 GHz with Core 2 Quad Q6600,
2. Bumped RAM to 4G,
3. Replaced an Asus P4 motherboard with Abit IP35Pro.
4. Replaced nvidia 6800GT with 8600GTS.
5. Added a new SATA hard drive. Kept the IDE hard drive around.

I actually expected to spend a lot of time on installing and configuring Gutsy, after all, it’s still linux, right? Well, not really. The only hiccup I had was when trying to boot up from the live dvd for the first time, the kernel (2.6.22) got confused by my new SATA drive, and would take very long to boot. It took 1 minute to find the answer by google: add ‘irqpoll’ to the boot options.

And it just cruised from there:

1. Boot into the live dvd desktop, run installer, copy files, reboot into the new installation.
2. The “restricted driver manager” automatically prompts if I would like to enable the proprietary nvidia driver. Yes, I would. Reboot.
3. Run nvidia-settings to set up the dual monitors. Copy the config fragments for the logitech marble mouse and natural keyboard into /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Restart X server.

And that’s it. I was able to pick up whatever it was that I was working on before the upgrade as soon as I had the home dir copied over from the backup machine.

It wasn’t like that on the WinXP side. Not at all.

I booted into the XP installation CD. The installer apparently got confused by the combination of the IDE and SATA drives, but it didn’t say anything, instead went straight to the screen where it showed a list of two partitions, each from… wait… the same drive number with exactly the same id and bus numbers? And none of the actual, existing partitions on either drives were shown?

I then pressed Enter on one of the drives and got to the next screen where it warned that it was about to format the partition and “all data will be lost”. So naturally I decided to abort right then and there, and boot back into linux to make sure I’ve got everything backed up. Well, what do you know, all data were lost already by then, because, apparently, the XP installer had already wiped out the partition table.

In hindsight, and to be fair, I probably did something real stupid there by pressing that Enter key, after having seen the confused partition/drive list. But, hey, you are supposed to tell people before you wipe out their partition table, right?

So I had to go through the whole exercise again, except this time I installed XP first, and then Kubuntu. Even it worked this time, I still had to spent way more time in the XP part than I did in Kubuntu. To begin with, it took 40 minutes or so to see the initial XP desktop, and then another 6-7 reboots to install all the service packs, security patches, etc.

Now, before somebody screams “fanboy!” I’ll admit that it’s not exactly fair to directly compare Kubuntu 7.10 with the original Windows XP. After all, the latter was first released in 2001. But then, I will also argue that, as a paying customer of a retail Windows XP license, I have never received so much as an offer from Microsoft to replace the original installation CD with one that can handle my rather not so very unique SATA+IDE configuration.