Lubuntu Partitioning Problem

[JFTS]

I'm trying to install Lubuntu 15.04 on a Sony Vaio VGN-P21Z along with Windows XP. I've booted into a live USB Lubuntu and begun the installation from the inside. I thought I could save some time and used the included partitioning tool instead of partitioning the HDD inside Windows; it warned me this could take a lot of time, but I'm sitting here for 5 hours and nothing has happened on the screen. It just shows the little spinning circle.

Why is it taking so long? And, is it safe to turn off the system? It seems this could take forever.

 

[FAST6191]

Depends what you are doing.

If you are just assigning some unpartitioned space (or are commandeering the recovery partition or something) then yeah that is a long time. If you are shrinking a fairly full and fairly fragmented partition* on a slow drive (and a search says this is a 4200 rpm drive on an older atom processor so slow is likely) then 5 hours is not unreasonable, though it should hopefully at least have told you what start it is on (maybe some more if you click a little triangle to get more info).
Depending upon what stage the thing has crashed on will vary how troublesome it is -- stopping it in the middle of reallocating files is generally bad news if you wanted the data on the drive, probably not beyond recovery but certainly not a quick session with photorec or recuva or something.

It might be something as simple as the drive refused to unmount -- if you have one still mounted somewhere try closing any file manager windows/running programs and forcing it to unmount. Gparted will usually fail gracefully in that situation but who knows.

For what it is worth the diskmgmt.msc program would not have been able to do much of this -- it is pretty much only useful for deleting, creating and formatting new ones. Resizing partitions is a bit outside its ability.

*if you are having trouble visualising it then if you have 80 gigs and it was full then the files will be scattered all over it, the tool then has to take all the files and put them all into one part of the disk so as to give it an unbroken chunk to call a new partition.

I would leave it a while longer (perhaps overnight), after checking it is not still mounted, and if nothing has happened then turn it off and prepare to have lost the XP partition's data.

 

[JFTS]

Actually, it is a 80 GB HDD. The idea is to leave the preinstalled Windows XP and a single research program I use on them (with a bit of free space, it's 22 GB) an use the rest 57 GB for Lubuntu.

I'm pretty sure the machine has not crashed since all the menus and options react normally (choices get highlighted and the "please wait" circle icon is still spinning).

I guess I will leave it for a bit longer but I didnt understand that bit about mounted drives. How can I check this?

 

[JFTS]

Well, eventually Lubuntu installed after 10 or so hours.

Now it boots normally through GRUB, but I can't boot into Windows. There is only a blinking dash. I guess I need to repair the Windows partition. Does anyone know how to do that?

 

[FAST6191]

That will depend what was done to break it. I am quite surprised it was broken though, I can not remember the last time it was not my fault that windows stopped booting from Linux.

Do you have a copy of hiren's bootCD (I can't link it as it has a cut down version of XP built in) as well as ultimate boot CD ( http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ )?
The former will have various tools to force boot certain partitions/drives and from there you can narrow things down, and probably fix it with hiren's as well.

 

[JFTS]

Thanks for the answer and yes, I do have Hiren's Boot CD and have succesfully used it in the past, but nothing works here.

I should mention though that with its built in bootloader I'm able to bypass GRUB and load Windows XP normally. I will probably just erase the entire Lubuntu partition, remove GRUB completely, repartition with a Windows program and then reinstall Lubuntu.

Any other suggestions are welcome.

 

[jurassicplayer]

Possibly your grub config is incorrect? You can check the entry in /boot/grub/grub.cfg and I think normally the Windows entry would be something like "... chainloader +1". For reference, I've provided an example entry from my own working grub config:

Spoiler

menuentry 'Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sda1)' --class windows --class os $menuentry_id_option 'osprober-chain-14D0B2EF2B5C8D9B' {
    insmod part_msdos 
    insmod ntfs
    set root='hd0,msdos1'
    if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then
     search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint-bios=hd0,msdos1 --hint-efi=hd0,msdos1 --hint-baremetal=ahci0,msdos1  14D0B2EF2B5C8D9B
    else
     search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 14D0B2EF2B5C8D9B
    fi
    chainloader +1
}

I believe Lubuntu has os-prober by default which normally generates grub configurations for any OSes it finds on the hard drive, so you could also try manually generating your grub.cfg and seeing if there are any problems with os-prober failing or something.