Paritions

Upgraded the hard disk in the VAIO to 250GB, not being aware there is a 137GB limit on older bios.

 

Installing XP from the recovery DVDs it writes the normal C:, D: and recovery partition, so you get almost 100 gigs on D:

 

Then installing Ubuntu which is able to see the second half ( past 137GB ) of the disk fine. But when grub the bootloader tries to load the boot menu, it can only read up to 137GB which can't see the Ubuntu paritition and fails.

 

Start reinstall from the beginning, this time placing the Ubuntu boot partition and swap space before 137GB ( cutting 10 gigs of D: ), boots ok, but I see that the Disk Manager in Windows can see the second half of the disk as free space even though I formatted it as NTFS, so I ask disk manager to reformat it again, and it says an error has occured please reboot, at which point another grub error has occured. So using the Ubuntu Live CD, I use GParted to take a look at the disk which says it is completely unallocated.

 

Started reinstall from beginning this time leaving past 137GB all to Ubuntu and having the boot partition in the last 10GB before 137GB.

 

There doesn't appear to be any BIOS upgrades from Sony. I tried accessing the Ubuntu home partition with Ext2 IFS for Windows but it can't see the partition

Done