(SOLVED) long wanted to move away from microsoft

Hi ...

I run my computer on Windows 7 which I've managed to have it look almost like my XP.

This afternoon, I was on the net looking for information about printers and in one of the forums, I spotted the name Zorin so I went onto the website and read up about it.
It sounded very good ... an easy entry to Linux yet very windows-like ... so I downloaded it and then registered for this forum.

My W7 computer runs 4 drives plus a spare external hard drive which I use from time to time. My plan is to run Zorin on the external drive.
When I fire up my computer, I understand that I will be able to choose between Windows 7 or Zorin.

My question is this ...
If I choose Zorin, which will be on its own dedicated drive, can I use my programmes within W7 on the other 4 drives without having to shutdown Zorin?

My thanks in advance,
Michael.

Following on from my previous post on the 22nd., I completed points 1 to 4 in the installation guide.
When I booted using my Zorin bootable dvd, the first Zorin screen I saw was in blue and showing what looked like a little man with his arms in the air.
I hit 'enter'.
The next screen was a list of a number of languages with English highlighted.
I hit 'enter'.
The screen changed to blue again with 'Try Zorin without installing' highlighted. (My choice would have been to go straight to a full hard drive installation.) There were another 3 or 4 more choices below that and as well as 6 choices controlled by F1 to F6 running along the bottom of the screen but everything looked greyed out except 'Try Zorin etc. ...' None of the keyboard controls worked.
After a few seconds, the screen went black with just a flashing cursor in the top-left corner. There was still no response from the keyboard controls.
All I could do was shut down the computer.

I repeated this a number of times but the response was the still the same.
I also re-ran the burning process twice, one disk each using Nero and ImgBurn at the slowest speed I could ... 4x ... and checked boot order in the BIOS ... 1st - cd/dvd, 2nd - c:\ drive ... .

I'm not sure where I go from here but I would welcome suggestions please.

And seeing as there's only another 7 hours 10 minutes to go till Christmas Day here in the UK, I hope everyone has a really Happy Christmas Day.

I am not sure about running Zorin from an external hard drive, because I am not sure where GRUB, the boot menu would be installed. Have you thought of trying Zorin on a thumb drive instead? If you download Unetbootin and burn Zorin with persistence you can save all your changes. It will run a bit slower from a USB key, but is still very useable. Persistence will be 4 gig by default, but you can extend it if you have a 16 gig or bigger USB key.

Create a Larger than 4GB Casper Partition
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/create-a-l ... partition/

Not sure if this is what you are looking for, but hopefully it helps you. Good luck anyway, I think if you give Linux/Zorin an honest try you will be happy with it.

OK, just be aware I have NEVER tried installing to an external drive other than USB using MultiSystem 3 off Softpedia.

This is how I would attempt it.

1. disconnect all drives in your PC leaving just the external drive connected.

2. Boot off the Zorin DVD - please follow my dual boot guide as an insight on using Easy BCD - this can be installed to your windows drive after you have completed the install to your external drive. See my tutorial video here to give you an idea what to do:

http://vimeo.com/110085401

3. You cannot run windows apps from Zorin unless you install them to Zorin using Wine or PlayOnLinux - then it will depend if they are 'runnable':

https://appdb.winehq.org/

and:

https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/

Keep us posted!

thanks for your 2 replies which i've just read with great interest.

what stood out from both of them was the matter of (infered) possible problems when installing to an external hard drive and i'm not sure when this should be the case. i've always considered an hd to be no different in operation, whether it's just for storage or for installed programmes, irrespective of where it's installed. to my mind, included in my list of 'drives' are flash drives, various camera cards, cd/dvd rom drives, even floppy drives as well as familiar hard drives and i'm able to run them accordingly from within windows explorer. apart from camera cards, i'm able to install programmes and store data. as regards my external hd, the only reason it's external is simply because i don't have enough space to position it and wire it up inside my computer box ... then it would be an internal drive.

the only reason i wanted to install zorin on its own (external) drive was because i didn't wnt to have to partition one of the other drives. perhaps i've got "the wrong end of the stick" but i'd really like to know why you never install to an external drive or were you only referring to zorin?

as regarding my attempts in installing zorin, i have made no further headway other than the details set out in my 2nd post (on the 24th) ... ie. after i click 'english' as the preferred language, the screen changes and that's it ... i have to re-boot ...so i still haven't got zorin!!

i downloaded 'playonzorin' but have no idea how to activate it ... can't see any .exe file.

attempted to look at http://www.pendrivelinux.com/create-a-l ... partition/ but a message said it was a broken link. will look further but not sure what a thumb drive is ... a flash drive?

had a look at multisystem 3 too. haven't found out much about it yet ... does that give a similar result as the youtube video put out by matthew moore about dual-booting the unconvential way? i downloaded that just after i got the zorin distro ... have watched it a few times ... excellent ... seems very easy to achieve a successful ending.
anyway, as per your suggestion, i shut down all drives except the external one and attempted to boot from the zorin dvd but still got no further than my previous attempts.

downloaded easy bcd in anticipation of eventually installing zorin but had difficulty watching http://vimeo.com/110085401 because it was buffering all the time ... like stopping sometimes for perhaps 5 to 10 minutes at a time. not sure why because other sites were okay apart from maybe a few seconds of buffering. very strange. sound was understandable but a bit hard to follow.

looked at https://appdb.winehq.org/ ... there are a number of packages listed for different distributions ... which one would be okay for zorin?

finally, also looked at https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/ ... the crossover page came up for seeing which windows programmes would run in zorin. i guess it is similar to 'playonzorin' and 'wine'?

my relationship with linux started some years ago ... more off than on ... because i found it difficult with the terminology, language and coding as well as not as user-friendly as windows. when i spotted the zorin advert on line, it sounded a lot more easy that some of the others i've tried in the past which is why i'd like to persevere ... will definitely keep you posted.

if you or anyone else can suggest a way as to how i can get this installation to work as it should, i'd be very grateful.

a happy new year to you all ...

michael.

Hi, the reason I don't use an external drive is that I don't have spare capacity (used for backups of all machines). The other is that GNU/Linux does not like external drives present during install so you had best disconnect all other drives apart from your external one for install. With respect for MultiSystem 3 you need to have a working install of GNU/Linux for it to run - there is no Windows Port. I use it for formating large thumb/flash drives and can have about 6 different distros I can choose from at boot time! Your BIOS must support boot from external device.

As regards not getting very far with install, try decalmans excellent text based install route:

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=8004&p=38810#p38714

with non-computer stuff taking a up a lot of my time and having to be away from home on business on and off since the new year, i was able to return to address my zorin problem earlier this week.

the latest story in this saga is that i have now managed at last, to install core 9 on my c: drive alongside my w7. the hard drive is 80gigs with w7 taking up just over 26gigs. i set 45gigs for zorin with 2gigs for the swap file and let the installation run automatically. everything seemed fine and when finished, i rebooted expecting a choice memu to appear which would allow me to either go into w7 or zorin but that didn't happen. i was so disappointed! the computer went straight into windows.

i decided to re-install zorin again but just after the start, the details of the drive showed that the installation complete with the swap file and the space in the drive was now much less.

i have no idea what went wrong and i don't think i left anything out.

so close yet so far! is there a simple way of getting the computer to dual-boot.
would be grateful for any suggestiions please.

Hi,

take a look at the partition guide and see if it is more or less a match for your partition layout:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2601

See the part about "Boot Repair" (Fixing MBR) which is a very useful tool for future use!:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

Let us know if this helps!.

Also see my tutorial video here:

https://vimeo.com/110085401

again having been home and away more times since the new year than i care to remember, i can now give you another update, this time with a more positive result.

@ wolfman ...
when i first read your posts which included links similar to 'viewtopic .............etc', in my ignorance, i just highlighted them and pasted them in google and when the different sites came up, they didn't seem to give me the answer i was looking for so i ended up virtually abandoning them. it was only in the last week or so when i accidently clicked on one of the links that i got the response that i'd been looking for ... totally differentl from all my other attempts. had no problem with the url links (http:// ............ etc) because i was easily able to recognise those from the way it appeared.
@ swarfendor437 ...
was very interested in your vimeo tutorial about keeping the bootloader intact ... 'bootloader intact' being what first attracted me to michael moore's video except that he used linux mint in his tutorial and i was looking for zorin 9. have seen very little of yours but i will be downloading it in the next couple of days. not sure if it was my end but the audio sounded weird in parts and non-existent in the rest. i checked my audio and it seemed okay so not sure what went wrong. the video quality was fine.

anyway, the long and the short of it is that i was able to read up on gparted and how to install zorin using the 3 different routes if/when appropriate and as well as save the the various guides. i now have core 9 safely installed on my laptop which seems to be working just fine. i will have a few questions but if i can't work out the answers, i'll save them up and put them in my next post.

once i've succeeded in getting the hang of perhaps just a few of the zorin basics, i'll make a start in installing it on my desktop to dual-boot with w7.

thank you very much for all your help and suggestions ... really much appreciated ... and thanks too to all the other folk who took the time to at least read my posts.

Hi mipak,

Some explanation on the video.

1. I used 'gespeaker' - this is standard 'gnome accessibility software' which speaks text - I became frustrated after attempting to add each file to the video which caused OpenShot Video Editor - the video in itself is pretty much self-explanatory so just make notes as you go along. I spent over 24 hours (not continuously) attempting to upload overnight to my veoh.com channel who claimed my bandwidth for uploads was too narrow - balderdash (insert your own expletive here! ). There is partial degradation of video as I compressed 6 Gb worth to 2.4 using VLC media player and uploaded to vimeo.com which cost me a year's subscription to get it to you on Vimeo!

2. After I gave up on adding 'gespeaker' files to the video I filled in with some of my preferred creative commons licenced music - 'Open your Mind, Open your Ears' - to free music of all genres at http://www.jamendo.com

3. Best music player 'Clementine'

hi ...
very sorry to hear of the drama you had in trying to upload your tutorial.
when i downloaded it, i used an excellent programme which i paid for ... can't remember the price but it wasn't expensive ... called internet download manager which intergrated perfectly with firefox.
i used it to d/l your tutorial overnight onto my windows desktop but unfortunitely, it stopped at the 97% mark which i only discovered the next morning. a pity really because i'd hoped that it would have played much better than via vimeo.
but yes, from what i've seen of the video, it is quite easy to follow and understand so once i've learnt a bit more about zorin, i'll attempt a dual-boot installation on the desktop.
i've not heard of the clementine music player but will google it later. up till now, i've used vlc media player together with an external set of speakers for both listening to music and watching films/videos ... seems to give good results.
will also have a look at jamendo.com
cheers ...

Hi, I am lucky, I have no limits on my download usage and appreciate that some users require Download Accelerator Managers but it can lead to the situation that you described - 97% and then screwed. I may seek to open an 'Educational' account with 'Box' that I have for Personal usage and post links once there - provided it will give me enough space!

Will send you a PM when I get home tonight (time permitting) but I will send you one in due course!