There comes a time when the 20Gb partition you set aside on a dual-boot system to run Ubuntu just isn’t big enough, so the idea of upgrading to a spanky new hard drive with a little more room becomes very attractive.

This is a path I started down this afternoon on my Compaq Presario F500, which has proven to not be painless, even with the strides Gutsy has taken in hardware compatibility. However, I’m getting ahead of myself.

To do the upgrade, I went out and bought a nice new 120Gb SATA drive, and downloaded a copy of the Gutsy desktop ISO. After installing the new HDD, I rebooted with the Live CD, which promptly failed to load GDM, with the old ‘freeze when switching graphic modes’ bug from Feisty (and Debian 4). Unfortunately, no amount of fiddling about with boot time settings (including the work-around for Feisty, adding ‘vga=792′ to the end of the boot command) resolved this issue.

I managed to boot the Gutsy live CD in safe mode, and also managed to install Gutsy on the new hard drive. However, I still could not boot into GNOME. I rewrote the xorg.conf to match a known, working one (the one posted elsewhere here), and it still wouldn’t boot, insisting on freezing when switching modes, or inly running in low graphics mode. When I did finally manage to get GDM running, networking wasn’t working at all, and I kept getting a strange bug that I eventually tracked down to being something to do with DBUS.

So I took the easy way out and started again, using an Ubuntu 6.10 Desktop CD I had lying around. I used this quite by accident, but it’s proven to be a good thing, as I also had a 7.04 Alternate CD lying around, so once 6.10 was installed, I could do a straight package upgrade from the 7.04 Alternate CD.

This left me with a (mostly!) working system that I’m still twiddling with, although as you can see from this post I am connected to the Internet again. The bcm43xx drivers still blow goats, so I followed a guide on the Ubuntu forums to download and install ndiswrapper and the wireless drivers from Dell (even though I have a Compaq, the wireless chip reports itself as a Dell chip…). Following the instructions step by step, rebooting where indicated, and everythign was up and running and I am now, once more, wireless on the Compaq.

However I still have a major issue with the graphics settings. This laptop has a NVIDIA chip in it, so one of the first things to do is download the latest NVIDIA drivers, and install them. The only problem I have at the moment is that I have to re-compile them every time I want to run X… For some reason, I can compile the drivers, boot into GDM and work properly, but when I reboot, I have to recompile the same driver, overwriting it with the same version. More investigation is needed.

Now, however it’s time to remove this brand new hard drive and put the old one back in. It wasn’t until I went rummaging that I realised my USB harddrive adaptor only wotks with PATA hard drives, not SATA. So to get sll my settings and configuration files from the old hard drive means re-installing it and copying everything to a DVD. Wish me luck!