Project: Lappy - Part 1 of 3

Back in February 2007, I helped a workmate to recover precious photos from a notebook which wouldn't boot. This same workmate had offered me another challenge over the weekend:

install Windows XP onto the primary partition and setup dual boot with the existing Kubuntu 7.04 system on the second partition - all this on his IBM ThinkPad R40 (2722-9BM) notebook (which he's given the nickname, Lappy) which also happened to contain sick partitions.

This challenge did not start off on the right leg because I had left Lappy at work on Friday. The realisation dawned upon me only once I was already at home! So I had to return to work to grab Lappy and thankfully no-one had taken it from my desk. My wife and 11.5 months old bubs got a joyride (20 min each way) out of this trip so they were happy - especially the little one!

After doing a bit of research on the net, I was ready to proceed.

Basically, the steps involved were:

1. install Windows
   
2. setup dual boot
   
3. clean up the messy partitions

Part 1 - Install Windows

I was warned Lappy has a dodgey optical drive which would sometimes work and other times not at all.

In anticipation the optical drive would not work for me I went online to look for solution that would allow me to boot from a USB flash drive and install Windows from this instead. I came across this resource, Installing Windows XP from USB. I followed the instructions to the tee but did not have much success with booting off the flash drive. I would get the "no operating system" error. As it was stated in the article, this method does not work for all flash drives. Anyway, I gave up this avenue as it had taken up a bit of time to prepare the flash drive, etc. But I'll definitely revisit this idea at a later time because it would be handy to have a flash drive that you can bung into any old system which supports booting from USB to install Windows. Definitely more friendly on the pockets: would you rather carry around your Windows CD or a USB flash drive in your pocket?

I thought I would try out my luck and pray the optical drive would work for me. As it turned out lady luck was on my side that night! Windows was installed from the CD without any hiccups. Hooray! Then I proceeded to update XP with everything under the sun - from Service Pack 2, IE 7, WMP 11, through to all the critical security updates. This did take a bit of time using the wireless (802.11b) connection and I was doing this from the warmth and comfort of the bed!

At this stage, only Windows loads at startup. The next installment - setting up dual boot of both XP and Kubuntu operating systems.