Dual boot Vista and Linux

I've been running Vista on my Home PC for the last couple of weeks. Now, before installing Vista, I was running Windows XP with Ubuntu installed on a separate partition. Grub was installed in the MBR, and I could choose either to boot into XP or Ubuntu. When I installed Vista, I made sure it installed over my XP partition. Vista re-wrote the MBR with its own bootloader, no surprises there! In the history of windows, it showed scant respect to any other bootloaders or OS for that matter. So now I couldn't boot into Ubuntu. I had to figure out a way to get back to dual-booting.

I decided to use Vista's bootloader to boot Linux. On Windows XP, you only had to modify boot.ini. On Vista this has been replaced with Boot Configuration Data(BCD). To make changes to BCD, we need to use a command line program called Bcdedit. Bcdedit /help displays the help for this tool.

First I needed the grub bootloader information to be copied into a file. So I pop in any linux installation disk, and reboot my machine to boot from the CD. Then I enter the rescue mode. On my PC, Ubuntu was installed in partition 4 of my hard disk. But Grub was installed only in the MBR, which was over-written by Vista. No problem, first I install Grub to partition 4 of my hard disk!

# grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/sysimage /dev/hda4

Note that my root partition was mounted under /mnt/sysimage. Now to copy the bootloader into a file, I ran the following commands.

# cd /

# dd if=/dev/hda4 of=./boot.lnx bs=512 count=1

Now I reboot into Vista, and copy the file "boot.lnx" from my linux partition to Windows. To do this, I used the program Explore2fs. I saved the file in "C:\". Now I had to run Bcdedit to add a new section to the BCD. I started a command-prompt with Administrator previliges and ran the following commands.

C:\> bcdedit /copy {ntldr} /d "Linux"

The output of this command is a hex number which is a reference for the new entry. Copy this hex number.

C:\> bcdedit /set {HexNumber} device boot

Replace {HexNumber} with the hex number displayed previously.

C:\> bcdedit /set {HexNumber} path \boot.lnx

C:\> bcdedit /displayorder {HexNumberl} /addlast

Now I was able to boot into Ubuntu using Vista's boot menu.

iPhone theme for Pocket PC

No matter how people critisize Apple for iPhone (closed source, price, locked etc.), there is no dispute on one item. Everyone simply loves the iPhone interface! So how about theming your Windows Mobile 5 based pocket pc to look just like the iPhone !?

This is exactly what many bloggers have been doing for the past few days. But Apple has gone after the people who ripped the iPhone icons to be used on the pocket pc! I can point you to this link, which still contains all the instructions. But all the copyrighted material has been removed. It is enough to get you started. The ripped icons are all over the net, so I wont link it here again.

All I can say is, my iPaq now looks very much like the iPhone! Looks great!