[chadrickmcgowan]

I purchased a Toshiba Portege for school which had Windows XP Tablet originally loaded onto it. I was slightly impatient and stubborn so I decided to dual boot with Ubuntu when I got it, being that the company I purchased it from wouldn't mess with that. Well, I used to be computer savvy and still consider myself decent behind a keyboard so I read up on the issue, partitioned my drive and went ahead with my Ubuntu install. Since I performed this action I have been unable to load Windows, constantly receiving a "Windows cannot find hard disk" error Those aren't the exact words but it is very close. I really NEED both OS on my system, so I attempted to re-install XP with no luck. I received the same error as before. I was then informed that one must install Windows on the drive first and Linux second in order to complete this process successfully. So I reformatted the drive, and used an Ubuntu Live ISO on my flash drive to allocate the drive into (first) Fat32 followed by NTFS. It doesn't matter which file system I use I still receive the same error. Linux is able to read everything, yet I can't get any response out of Windows. What can I do to gain success here? I need Windows to communicate with my desktop, and need Linux for stability, speed, and to take use of free programs equivalent of $400 PC counterparts (such as SPSS). Will someone please solve my issue?

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Here is one tutorial that seems pretty straight forward: How to dual boot Windows XP and Linux (XP installed first)

[Ztruker]

Here is one tutorial that seems pretty straight forward: How to dual boot Windows XP and Linux (XP installed first)

[calvert]

i believe you have an older version of xp and it has no support for the hdd controllers,

you need to find the right drivers and make a slip-streamed copy of xp with the drivers integrated

ubuntu (and all linux distro's) can communicate with windows so there would be no problem there,

as a side note, there is no need to do any partitioning before install, windows will format the drive and ubuntu will give you a guided install, it has a built in partitioner,
ubuntu will format its own partition to ext4 and auto-add swap space,
all you need to do is tell it to shrink your windows partition to the desired size and ubuntu will do the rest

[Macboatmaster]

Adding to what Calvert has posted, which is entirely correct.

This is the relevant point

as a side note, there is no need to do any partitioning before install, windows will format the drive and ubuntu will give you a guided install, it has a built in partitioner,

However as YOU partitoned it, the likely result was indeed the one you obtained.

More to the point, where did you then ALLOW Ubuntu to install - as their is a choice, one of which is indeed to use the whole disk space.
Then we have this complication

So I reformatted the drive

Therefore and I am sorry that I may be the bearer of bad news, it is just possible, depending on which format you used, that you may now have ruined your chances of restoring Windows on that Toshiba Portege from the recovery partition. There is a hidden partition on the drive on many Toshiba Portege models, but you have not said which it is.
See this
http://aps2.toshiba-...02140000R01.htm

and go here to confirm the actual facility on your Portege
http://uk.computers....ervice=UK#tab6;

by selecting the required entries on the right of the page.

I do appreciate that you said you have attempted to reinstall XP and the procedure you used may well lead back to the point made by Calvert.

[Macboatmaster]

chadrickmcgowan

Welcome to GeekstoGo.
However you have created three separate threads on this problem.
This one here, one in the LInux forum and one in the Other Operating systems forum.

I have moved the two replies that were made in the Linux forum, one by calvert and one by me (Macboatmaster) to this thread.
I have closed the thread in the Linux forum and the thread in the Other Operating systems forum.

Please do NOT in future create multiple threads on the same problem.
That said you have not yet replied to any of them, please do so when you get chance.