You are partly right Mark, in that my experiences with Ubuntu and Virtual PC were in an attempt to install software RAID. However it wasn't down to anything extreme that the issue occurred.

If you install Ubuntu 8.04, 8.10 or 9.04 under Virtual PC then the earlier versions simply won't boot once you have installed. Once you fix them so they will boot X comes up with a garbled screen. In 9.04 it boots after install ok, but X is still garbled and if I remember rightly the mouse doesn't work. I really don't understand why someone didn't address this somewhere between 8.04 and 9.04, the issues were bugged.

While running Ubuntu under Virtual PC might be an extreme activity in some circles, in the Windows "power user" community it is the natural thing to do when you want to try something new out without building a new machine. Sure you could just boot the live CD, but that isn't quite the same.

At this point someone is going to suggest WUBI. Which is a great idea, except that WUBI is broken on the 9.04 CDs !

Also, when I talked about a couple of PCs I have that won't boot the live CD, they aren't extreme examples at all. One of them is a Dell desktop, the motherboard of while is/was used in a whole series of Dell models (both consumer and small business targeted models) and is therefore sat on hundreds of thousands (maybe even millions) of normal users desks. The live CD failed to boot on it in 8.04 and it still fails to boot in 9.04, for the same reason (issues with not liking the SATA controller when it isn't in RAID mode or something like that).



True, I had huge "fun" getting XP onto Eryl's Dell mini 9, convincing XP to install from USB is not easy, even when following online instructions. And getting XP onto modern hardware can be a challenge without all the slipstreaming nonsense.