Question #77500 on Ubuntu changed: https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/77500
Tom proposed the following answer: Hi I noticed from "fdisk" that your drive seems to start at cylinder 63 - "/dev/sda1 * 63", apart from that it's looking good. With linux it's easier to keep your data&settings separate from the main part of the OS & all the programs so having the 2 separate partitions is an advantage. We keep all the data&settings in one main folder called "/home", with sub-folders such as "/home/username/Pictures". Typically these folders get used even by Kodak cameras rather than setting up some obscure folder hidden away somewhere as happens in Windows. We can help you take advantage of having /home on a separate partition with almost no extra fuss :) When you are running Ubuntu from the Cd having chosen the option "Try Ubuntu without changes to this machine" we call that a "LiveCd session". It would be a good plan to use the "Places" menu on the top taskbar to backup your data from your Windows partitions (Windows calls partitions "drives" even though they are just parts of the 1 physical drive in your system). To backup the data simply copy it all to an external drive or burn onto cd/dvds. Then open a terminal console to type in more commands, just as you did with the "fdsik -l" command but this time type free -m this should show how large your ram is. It will also show how large the "Linux swap / Solaris" partition is and it would be helpful if you could let us know those values. Then go up to the top taskbar and click on System - Administration - Partition Editor Please let us know if there is another partition in front of sda1 and how large it is, also let us know how large sdasda6 & sda7 are. Also let us know if sda1 is completely full, if it is then don't follow any more advice in this post until after we can clear some space on that Windows "C: "drive"". Assuming there's enough free-space right-click on sda1 and resize it so that the start of the partition leaves 100Mb + (2 x Ram) of empty space at the 'beginning' of the physical drive. If you took the space off the end of the partition and then moved the partition along then click the "Undo" arrow button and make sure the whole operation is going to get done in just 1 step, otherwise it can take ages especially on such a large hard-drive :) Now click on "Apply", this really will take quite a long time, plenty of time to make a cup of coffee, or possibly even have lunch! The next steps are much faster :) Right-click at the beginning of the grey space and create a new 100Mb partition at the very start of the hard-drive, this needs to be a Primary, ext3 partition (this will be the "/boot" partition). After it make another partition, this one filling the rest of the empty space - it needs to be larger than the size of your ram, about twice ram (on such a large disk) is about perfect. this new partition should also be a Primary Partition but should be a "file- system" we call "linux-swap" rather than another "ext3". At this point when you click on the "Apply" button it should complete both operations quite quickly. At this point it would be good if you could do the "sudo fdisk -l" command again and let us see the results of that this time :) Just to check that it's all going ok. Now assuming that sda6 is over 5Gb you can do a really good install, roughly along the lines of https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WindowsDualBoot but crucially when you get to the partitioning section about halfway through choose the bottom option of the 3 to do "Manual Partitioning". It will re-scan the drive and then show exactly how you have already laid out the drive but it has different colour-coding to gparted. Right click and "Edit" the tiny 100Mb partition at the beginning of the hard-drive to set it's "Mount Point" to "/boot", it's ok to reformat this partiton. Next "Edit" sda5 (the larger of the 2 pre-existing partitions) to set it's "Mount Point" to "/home" and finally edit sda6 to set it's "Mount Point" to "/" (also called "Root" as it is the start of the linux file-structure), again it's ok to reformat both of these 2 partitions. The crucial one to make sure is UNticked in the "Format?" column is sda1, probably the 3rd partition along by now - because that is the one that Windows calls your "C: drive" so reformatting it would be really bad. After this install completes you should be able to happily reboot into eithe Windows or Ubuntu. The menu will hopefully have a few more options such as one for Ubunu called "recovery mode" which has some handy menu items in a disturbingly blue screen - typically it's worth running through most of these tasks about once a month before choosing "Resume normal boot" which is the default option on that menu. There are a couple of things to do to tidy that menu but we can help with that later. Good luck with all this! Feel free to ask for more (or less) detail about any of this! Good luck and regards from Tom :) -- You received this question notification because you are a member of UF Unanswered Posts Team, which is an answer contact for Ubuntu. _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntuforums-unanswered Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ubuntuforums-unanswered More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
