One of my acquaintances has a ages old laptop which was not working properly (Read: Was agonizingly slow as hell) while it was running windows xp. So I gave them my Ubuntu live USB to try and get their work done (temporarily).
Today however they wanted to install Ubuntu permanently on their hard drive along with their windows xp installation so they called me for help about installing the OS. However while installing I noticed a crazy thing. Ubuntu installer could not detect windows xp and did not give the option like [Install alongside XP]/[Install instead of XP]. While initially when this happened I thought this must be because windows xp was old/had issues/etc. So i proceeded and though that I could manually adjust the partitions for better. However on the next screen Ubuntu failed to recognize the entire disk is the file system column there was a (?) symbol. The whole disk was like unknown filesystem.
The strangeness of the situation however does not just end here. After I closed the installer I noticed that the launcher was still showing the drives connected to the laptop and each and every drive was perfectly accesible. At this point I was thinking OK. Maybe its the USB so I thought of adjusting partitions from windows XP. On rebooting without the USB I got the message "Boot Sector error" or something like that (Don't remember the exact text).
In this case what should I do ?
TL,DR: Ubuntu live USB detects and reads all files and drives perfectly (via nautilus) but the installer does not. Also somehow the host laptops boot is messed up. What should I do. Please help ?
P.S. I am a person who is just slightly ahead of a computer newbie so less simple answers would be a great help. Thanks all
