You know you’re a bit of a dinosaur when you get excited and nostalgic at the prospect of using assembly language again. Assembler was the second computer language I learnt – straight after Sinclair BASIC on the ZX Spectrum, which was nearly 26 years ago. For a while I hand-assembled my programs, painstakingly writing each instruction on paper, and then converting the opcodes and operands into their hex equivalents for eventual POKEing into memory. I went on to learn x86 assembler, but haven’t used it in years. Until now!

Imagine that you have two hard drives (sda and sdb). Windows is installed and working happily(?) on sda. You have installed Ubuntu on sdb. You don’t want to mess with your Windows partition, so you’ve installed Grub to the MBR of sdb, but you do want to be able to launch Ubuntu via the Windows NTLDR boot menu. This was a problem, which recently arose on the Ubuntu forums. I’m blogging about it, because it was a lot of fun to solve, and it may help people understand a little better what goes on in the boot sequence. Read more…

Disclaimer: This post is not meant to cover every aspect of dual-booting – it is a general guide, so use these commands at your own risk. If you’re in doubt – don’t do it. Ask for help instead!

One of the most troublesome aspects of upgrading appears to be getting operating systems to play nicely together (or at least to co-exist peacefully) – particularly if you normally dual-boot between Ubuntu and Windows. I’ve had some difficulties on one machine with dual-boot. So here are the results of my investigations. Read more…