(Very sorry if this question has been asked before; I searched Google and Afterdawn, and none of the solutions worked)
I'm not a very smart guy.
Linux/Ubuntu is for the more...intellectually inclined.
Anyways...
I'm working on a Dell 5150 laptop with Windows XP service pack 2.
It holds approx 27 GB of memory and has 256 MB of RAM.
Here is what I did:
1) Downloaded the ISO from Ubuntu's website
2) burned it to disc
3) Opened the disk in Windows
4) Look at it for a bit.
5) Opened Partition Magic and backed up all information to "drive s"
6) Made an "Ubuntu" partition on my external hard drive.
7) Booted from the Ubuntu disc.
8) Did the CD integrity check thing, found 0 problems.
9) In confusion, opened the CD in Windows and tried to install to the "u drive"
10) rebooted
11) When the computer asked which OS to boot to, I chose Ubuntu
12) Got horrible, horrible time on it. (I waited 30 minutes; very non-responsive)
13) Figured the hassle is not for me, and decided to get it off.
14) Loaded XP installation disc, went to recovery console and gave commands "fixmbr" and "fixboot".
15) Restarted, but still found the boot menu.
16) Deleted the Ubuntu Partition
17) Repeated step 14
18) Restarted, but still found the boot menu.
So, I want to take everything Ubuntu off my computer.
But, I'm not so good at this kind of thing, so you might want to use as non-technical terminology as possible
How did you boot from CD, then install from Windows? You might find that that Wubi heap of crap is responsible for your problems, if you give it another try directly installing from the CD rather than through Windows you might have better luck.
If the boot menu is still there, you haven't deleted the partition, /boot still exists somewhere. So you haven't deleted the partition I would guess, and I'd be suspicious that you killed off your backup partition if you weren't being careful... One option would be to boot from the Ubuntu disc, and edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to make the Windows option the default, and put hiddenmenu near the top. You'll never notice it is even there.
Other option is just to reinstall Windows and make use of the backups, it only takes 6-12 months for the Windows registry to fill with crap and start to bog down, you might find the laptop is as good as new.
Most of us are 100% using Linux without dual booting in here, so you're probably better off resurrecting that thread on the Ubuntu forums. I feel sorry for you, your experience isn't typical, and I'm tempted to blame Wubi for it completely (it appears to be a buggy POS that was rushed into use), and I'd also strongly recommend not giving up and trying again booting from the disc.
Edit: Just for shits and giggles, I went to the Wubi forum at ubuntuforums. http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=234 Pretty much the ENTIRE forum is problems, and the threads are all very active. I think you have your problem right there mate. Post something in there and let them know how bad your experience has been, maybe they won't continue using it if enough people are having issues.
Yeah.. that sounds like a wubi mess. It hasn't installed grub to the MBR, but it sounds like it has added something to ntldr to point to grub instead of the windows boot routines.. That would explain why fixboot and fixmbr didn't work.
Wubi doesn't actually make a linuxpartition from what I read, what it does is the old virtual filesystem trick used in xebian and suchlike to use a directory of unspecified size as the root partition. It doesn't sound stable, at least not with respecter of nothing windows about.
First thing to do is get some normality.. before deleting loads of potentially important files.
Copy/paste your boot/grub/menu.lst and your /etc/fstab files for us to see if we can work out what the real problem is. there is no need to worry about grub remaining.. it can be modified to boot windows just fine, and you can always install a proper installation of linux at a later date and modify grub again to dual boot.
256MB ram isn't enough for ubuntu really, debian would work along with most of the other mainstream releases.. but ubuntu really needs a minimum of 380 with 512 recommended for any sort of speed. Mint works very well on laptops and systems with less oomph.
BTW.. you sound smart enough to me. Good post, lots of relevant info.
