knutee

First off Vista requires that you have a 40gb (or larger) partition with 15gb of free space to run. I’ve never acctually tried installing on a smaller partition, might just work. If you need to resize, move, create or delete partitions for the install I recomend the gParted live cd. Super-easy tool to use with all the functionalities you’ll ever need. Create the partition for the Vista install, but do not format it. For me, this caused the Vista installer to refuse using the partition. During my own install I repeatedly encountered an error saying “Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installation.”. After some googling I found a multitude of supposed sollutions:

• Set disk mode from SATA to IDE
• Find new drivers
• Remove all USB and Flash drives
• Lower boot priority of USB and Flash
• Run install in debug mode

..and so on. Neither of these acctually helped me, but worth mentioning incase someone else can benefit from these changes. What I discovered to be the problem was that Vista will not install on a disk not set to active/boot, and since my Ubuntu currently was the /boot disk, Vista install failed.

So everything from the top:

• Boot gParted and set up your partitions
• Create the Vista partition but do not format it
• Set the Vista partition to active/boot
• Reboot and install
• After Vista is installed, reboot and start gParted again
• Move the active/boot flag to the Linux disk
• Open a terminal
• Type in “sudo grub”
• In grub enter “root (hd0,0)”, this is if hd0 partition 0 is your original boot drive
• Then enter “setup (hd0)”
• Restart
• When linux boots up, open /boot/grub/menu.lst
• Add this field at the bottom:

title Microsoft Windows Vista # This is just the name showing in boot menu
root (hd0,2)                  # Point to partition. For me, hd0 partition 3
makeactive                    # Sets the active flag on boot
chainloader +1

For those that struggle with the (hd0,0) part:

• hd just points to the harddrives in the system, be it IDE or SATA/SCSI
• The first number (before the ,) represents the disk number. If you only have one disk, this number is 0. Second disk is 1, and so on.
• Second number (after the ,) represents the partition on the drive. As with disks, first partition is 0, second is 1 and so on. If you are unsure what number the partition has, open gParted and look it up there.

There we go! Now you should have a multi-boot system working perfectly