Yeah if you're new to the joys of partitioning and dual-booting, you can get some interesting results. I had to start over more than once myself. From day one I have always had OS/software on one drive, and personal data/music/porn on a separate physical drive. When I work on my machine, the data drive gets UNPLUGGED.

I had your exact problem. I got partitions mixed up, got confused on which drive was the one with the boot loader on it, etc. My current setup is essentially a workaround. I have three physical drives. Ubuntu, Windows, Data. The Ubuntu drive is the one that the BIOS boots first, and I manually put in the entry in GRUB to boot the Windows drive. It's kind of half-assed, but it works. I also know that if my Ubuntu drive is hosed, I can still use my Windows drive, and vice versa.

You'll probably never get away from Windows. I need it to read data from my Palm Pilot, and use some of the special features. I also use it for Newsbin, which grabs binaries from newsgroups, and for Photoshop. I can do the basic synchronizing for my Palm Pilot with Evolution, and there's also Gimp for photo processing. Gimp works okay, but sometimes is quite frustrating for functions that are quick and easy with Photoshop. I haven't found a software that compares with Newsbin. There are some Gnome programs that pull binaries from newsgroups, but none that are equivalent to Newsbin.

Hiya,

from what you describe, it shouldn't be too hard to get your primary drive to dual boot. For all practical purposes, you can ignore your data drive. As long as you don't accidently address it in the installation process (like you did last time), you have nothing to lose. Ubuntu and windows should both recognize it just fine, in theory.

And if you have a separate drive for your OS, then the cleanest way to do it would be to reinstall both operating systems afresh. Install windows first. Install ubuntu second (create a new partition for it). This will automatically install grub and your boot loading menu. Then install your virus protection software and all your other windows software.

But you don't have to reinstall windows if you don't want to. Just resize the partition and bear in mind my note below about the virus protection software:

If you are running virus protection software while installing ubuntu, the virus protection software may notice the changes to the boot sectors, decide its a virus and wipe out the boot loading software. If you turn off the anti-virus services, do the installation, and then turn them back on it seems to work fine. This was my experience with Norton/Symantec anyway.

But it's totally do-able and your system sounds like a good one to work as a dual boot box.