Acer Aspire AM3400-U4132 and OCZ Vertex 2 SSD

Hi. I'm new to the Tom's Hardware Forums, but I've just spent a couple weeks struggling with my system and after scouring forums for hours I got it working. I want to share what I did and other oddities about the system I just bought, so it will hopefully make someone else's life easier. I'm not very tech savvy, just extremely persistent (read: stubborn). If this is in the wrong place or not appropriate for here, I'm sorry. I'll remove it if need be. Anywas...

I purchased the Acer Aspire AM3400-U4132 (PT.SF702.014) Desktop PC Phenom II X4 955(3.2GHz) and 6GB DDR3 1TB HDD Capacity AMD Radeon HD 6570 Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit and an OCZ Vertex 2 OCZSSD2-2VTXE60G 2.5" 60GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD). I planned to have the SSD as a dual boot drive for Windows 7 and Ubuntu 11.04.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] -_-Product
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6820227550

FIRST THING I DID: BACK UP IN AS MANY WAYS POSSIBLE! haha I created two different sets of disk images and and two sets of restore disks. I had ZERO idea what I was doing and this particular SSD has a lot of reviews saying it crashes a lot (I haven't had any issues yet).

That SSD sure is a beauty, ha. It doesn't come with cables though, so I cracked open my system to see if there were any spares. The Acer had a spare connector for power going to the spare bay, but no spare SATA II cable. It does however have "hot-swappable" front access bay. I screwed the SSD into its 2.5" to 3.5" adapter and then the little tray and it looked like it would just slide in beautifully, but alas, after about a half hour of fiddling I established that it was just barely missing by about half a centimeter. So I unscrewed the connector from the back of the bay inside the case and ran the SATA cable down to the spare bay (and re-zip tied everything). I only put the two screws to my left/the back of the case in.

In the bios the only thing I had to change was setting the SSD as the first drive. I don't remember exactly how I did this, but I do know that in my research of SSDs as boot drives I came across some stuff about changing SATA and IDE settings, so I looked into those settings... I eventually just gave up and left everything the same and attempted to reinstall Windows. I don't remember what tipped me off, but I realized that I had just reinstalled Windows onto the same HDD, not the SSD. So I opened the case back up, unplugged the HDD, and then reinstalled Windows on the SSD successfully. I plugged the HDD in again and in windows explorer I went to my home folder and selected the properties of My Documents and changed its file path to begin with F (the stock HDD). I did that with My Videos, My Music, Temp, and Downloads also. I also created a second Program Files and Program Files (86), so when installing non speed essential programs I could just change the beginning letter of the destination and keep the SSD spacious and fast. I had to do all kinds of updates and the usual stuff, but windows was working. And working FAST.

Now if that's how fast windows is, I wanted to see Ubuntu! So, I burned a Live CD and went through the install process and it makes you restart at the end. It restarted straight to Windows, no grub screen. At first I thought it was just because the SSD was so fast that I had missed the automatic time out screen that then goes with the top choice. I proceeded to tinker/mess things up more for a couple weeks (I work 13 hour days, so I don't have a lot of free time). I started down the path of the sector 32 problem, but then established that wasn't my problem because I hadn't reinstalled windows after Ubuntu, it was the other way around. I tried UNetBootin and other GRUB stuff. Then somehow I "forgot" (or it got messed up somehow) my Ubuntu administrative password, so I went to reinstall it for the fourth time. I went into the manual settings mode and I had about 9 partitions listed, talk about screwing things up. I messed around there for a bit trying to delete them, but as I figured out it doesn't actually delete them until you click forward. I also discovered that it was giving me an error saying that I needed 2.5Gb on some unspecified partition to install properly, so that was another reason I started adjusting the partitions manually.

Here's what finally worked:
I selected and deleted every partition except for the NTFS (Windows) partition and of course the top listed one that's actually the whole hard drive. I got most of this next info from http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=499356 Then I made THREE new partitions. I'm not sure if it was that I had three this time (instead of two) or something else I did down the line. The first one was Primary with 512 MB with ext2 added to the beginning of the disk with the last drop down box /boot. The next one was Primary with 1000 MB added at the end of the disk with the linux-swap selection chosen and that greyed out the rest of the options. The last one's size was already automatically filled out with what was left size wise of my SSD and I had it as Primary with ext3 added at the end (although by this point I had figured out that it didn't matter where I put the /boot partition because my motherboard is new enough it is not bound by the 8GB rule) and the last drop down box set to / . The drop down box below where my partitions were listed automatically defaulted to something that ended in sda (sidenote: SSDs apparently partition as sda instead of hda), but all my partitions ended in sdb1 sdb2 sdb3 etc. and that sda was the only sda option, so I changed it to the top choice that ended in sdb (I think this was also a major factor in getting it to work). I hit install and when it was done and I restarted it took me to the GRUB loader menu!! It just kinda worried me for a bit because my screen flickered a lot at first, but after Ubuntu loaded the first time and since then I've had no issues.

So that's what happened, and after a lot of headache and time my computer is working how I want it to and I feel very accomplished! Windows loads in 14 seconds and Ubuntu in 3! It takes longer to get past the motherboard splash screen things ha. So does anybody have any thoughts/suggestions/tips that would help me or anybody else in this situation?