OP
Yesyesloud
Guest
A few important points:
- Installing an OS is not a beginner's or basic level user's task
One could perfectly state this sentence otherwise, unskilled people install popular OSes all the time. Apart from that, this topic was created by a person who didn't seem to be a beginner at setting up an operational system, but Mint and Ubuntu do offer full instructions "for dummies" to set them up, specially alongside windows.
- Windows for example does not provide an easy installation which covers all bases, provides all drivers for every piece of your hardware out of the box and offers to set up multi boot with other OS'. (In fact windows used to just overwrite the MBR with a new one, wiping out any bootloader you already had installed without prompting...)
Sticking the discussion to this topic... Unfortunately, a lot of multimedia drivers for home use are feature richer and often stabler in windows (Linux resounds much cleaner due to its low level hardware output capabilities though). Many proprietary video drivers are actually present in windows by default (MS-rebranded) and fully hardware-rendering capable, which doesn't happen with FOSS. Installing/updating drivers from its official proprietary releases (companies' websites/sources) is easier in Windows. A Windows setup may take over the MBR, but popular Linux distros installations respect and will only wreck it when the user is not careful enough. It's pretty basic to understand which may be installed first for multi-boot purposes; the topic owner knew it.
- GNU/Linux and any *nix system in fact does not refer to fixed disk drives as "drive C" or "drive H" or whatever - most UNIX like systems use the device names such as "/dev/sda1" or /dev/sda2" for specific partitions which are then mounted to the root file system. If you fail to read up on that and accidentally format your windows partition(s) - guess who's fault that is...?
The problems he experienced were solely his fault, I hope he figured that out. However he probably wasn't too familiar with *nix partition tables, he have used a Mac OS, and despite the apparently misleading MS-DOS references, he made sure on which storage devices and partitions his OSes and boot loaders were installed, guided by storage sizes. It was not hard to realize what he implied.
- If you installed grub to a partition instead of the MBR, another bootloader (for the existing OS) will have to be set up to chainload to grub and boot GNU/Linux - this means that you will have an unbootable GNU/Linux distro after installation until you set up, e.g. the windows bootloader to chainload to it.
Agreed. Also, as constantly mentioned, he could have placed grub in the MBR of the HDD in which only Mint was installed in order to boot it with bios shortcut keys - not ideal for most users, but it seems he would mainly run Linux for the sake of a single game.
- If you have a complex array of SSDs, fixed disks, removable disks, etc and find that you cannot boot after installation, it's most likely because device IDs have changed. These kinds of installs are for more advanced users and if this is a struggle start off with something simple - e.g. install on a separate dedicated fixed disk and install grub to it's MBR. This will give you the least amount of headache and leave the windows install, and presumably your precious data, untouched.
His disk array is rather simple. Ubuntu based distros installations are smart, they can take care of it. The main problem, here, is that he must acknowledge there were no software flaws.