I'm hoping he might offer his opinion of whether he thinks resizing Windows from the beginning would work for you too. If you resize Windows from the end, you won't have to change the boot.ini file, but there's a possibility you would have to use testdisk to get it booting OK too.ĮDIT: I see sdrubble strongly disagrees with me :), so I've PMed someone who I know has successfully resized his Windows partition from the beginning and got Windows to boot just fine. You will have to change the Windows boot.ini file though since Windows won't be the first partition anymore, and you will most likely have to use testdisk to do a few simple repairs on the Windows partition to get it booting OK.
By putting the partition at the front of the Windows drive, you won't have to worry about running into that limitation. And if your BIOS doesn't support booting USB drives, I think there is a fair chance one of those limits could apply to you. The reason is because there are some BIOSes that can't access anything on a HDD past either 8.5 GB or 137 GB, depending on how old your BIOS is. If you decide to put Ubuntu's boot files in a partition on your Windows drive, I would recommend resizing the Windows partition from the beginning (and not end) to make room, so that you can put the Ubuntu /boot partition at the beginning of the drive. Or, if you can boot from CDs (which I assume you can), you could put all your Ubuntu boot files on a CD and boot the CD to boot Ubuntu. Can you make an extra ~200 MB partition on your internal Windows drive? If so, you could make that Ubuntu's /boot partition, and your problem would most likely be solved. If your computer doesn't support booting from your USB drive, then you'll need to move your Ubuntu's boot files to a drive that will boot. I have the latest BIOS firmware for my mobo too (which is an ASUS A7v8x-x.). However, setting it to any of these doesn't work, and the USB HDD is not listed in my HardDisk boot Priority menu either. I can't get my BIOS to see the USB HDD: boot options are CD-ROM, MO, ZIP, LS210, USB FDD, USB ZIP.
Put just grub on usb from winows install#
The Linux install goes fine, but it's booting that's my problem.