Dual booting vista with Linux (or FreeBSD)
I had one of those ‘dammit!’ moments a few days back when through stupidity of my own I wrecked my Linux installation on my Dell E520.
In order to fix the issue I actually had to use the Dell recovery CD and software to burn a new CD image of Ubuntu. I also have a printer that only works under Vista (yes, it’s a Dell piece of crap printer) so I figured I would do a dual boot with Vista and Linux.
Anyone who has tried to do this will know that Vista does not like to dual boot due to its new bootloader which assignes UIDs to each drive and uses them to determine where it can find its files. Luckily you can also make Vista forget all about the UIDs.
Firstly you need to run the CMD utility as an Administrator (right click it) and then from the C:\Windows\System32 directory run the following commands:
BCDEDIT /set {bootmgr} device boot
BCDEDIT /set {default} device boot
BCDEDIT /set {default} osdevice boot
You can now install your bootloader of choice (Grub, Lilo or even your FreeBSD boot manager).
Now hopefully soon FreeBSD’s Xorg will support ATI’s X1300 line of cards so I can get back to running FreeBSD 