Hello,

I'm having a heck of a time getting Ubuntu to run on a dell latitude d820. I don't want to mess with the drive partitioning so I want to play with it using wubi. The laptop came with Vista Ultimate on it, and there's two partitions it seems like. The C:\ drive and an S:\ drive with a few hidden files. This might be a dell diagnostic tools that I can't remove.

The first problem is that when selecting Ubuntu in the windows boot loader, I would have an error message stating that GLDR or something isn't found. So next I copied a few wubi files (I think there were 3 or 4) including the menu.lst file from the C:\ drive to the S:\ drive. Now when I boot it flashes something really fast like Entering cmain(), something about memory E820, something about A20, etc.. So figuring it was a Gate A20 issue I downloaded wubildr.zip from another thread on this very forum. Now I am able to do a line by line check by pushing insert. Here's where I'm at now:

Get upper memory
hard drives: 1, int13: F0007C21, int15: F000F859
get_diskinfo(80), int13/41(80),version=AA210005, int13/48(80),err=0, C/H/S=16383/16/63, Sector Count/Size=312581808/0, int13/08(80),version=0, C/H/S=1024/255/63, int13/02(80),err=0,
Warning: MBR cylinders(19458) is not equal to the BIOS one (16383)

Warning: MBR total sectors(312592770) is greater than the BIOS one(312581808).
Some buggy BIOSes could hang when you access sectors exceeding the BIOS limit. LBA, C/H/S=19458/255/63, Sector Count/Size=312592770/512

boot drive=80, int13/4B01(80),err=1,drive=80, Not CD

get_cdinfo(7F), int13/4B01(7F),err=1,drive=7F, cdrom_drive == FFFFFFFF.

Starting cmain() ... Open (128,2)/default ... failure.


End of menu init commands. Press any key to enter command-line or run menu...
Pushing any key then proceeds to flash text really quickly in the upper right corner of the screen. Looks like these phrases are repeating forever:
Starting cmain()...
Something about "Memory" (too fast to see)
Something about "A20" (way too fast to see)

Any idea's what I could do? I went to this site: http://wubi-installer.org/ and downloaded the latest wubi. It downloaded the ubuntu 8.04.01 install. It took about a little over an hour to install.

Is it a problem with the Dell Latitude D820 laptop? I updated the bios from version A06 to A09 and it didn't fix the problem.

Is it a limitation with Windows Vista?

Thanks for your help!