Now that I was in Ubuntu I could access all my data. I backed everything up and decided I would take drastic measures. I deleted my hard drive. Reformatted into a single partition as ext3, then reformatted again as NTSF. I had the recovery cd that came with my laptop and went to reload XP. When I got to the point where I needed to enter any data with my keyboard or mouse, no luck.

Well, I don’t have time right now to mess with this problem. I need to get some work done on this website. So, since Ubuntu was working so well, I just installed it on my laptop. I’m building a Joomla site, so I needed a LAMP environment, which I got with XAMPP. I use Rockettheme templates so I’m going to need a way to edit PNG files. Other than that, I can basically do anything I was doing before.

The best part is, I installed VirtualBox for virtual machines. And then, I installed XP into that and it worked fine. So when I installed XP on the hard drive, it wouldn’t work. But when I installed XP inside of Ubuntu it works fine. Go figure. Anybody have any ideas let me know. FWIW, the keyboard works fine when booting. I can get into the BIOS and make changes.

A few hiccups, first, my wireless acted weird at first. The button to turn wireless on and off doesn’t really work. A few times when it started up the wireless wasn’t on and I couldn’t get it to turn on. After a few reboots playing with the switch during boot, it started working and has been working ever since. Secondly, I attached a second monitor at school to have Ubuntu on my laptop monitor and XP on the secondary monitor, but the resolution settings won’t go over 1024×768 which is kind of bumming me out. Finally, I tried to use a headphone/microphone today and it didn’t work. I installed the Gnome ALSA mixer but haven’t had any luck yet. We’ll see how this goes.