I want to set up dual boot laptop xp/ubuntu

bandit197

Im kinda a newbie to linux but ive been looking into it and want to put some time
into learning the system. Ive ran the live cd of ubuntu and loved it. I tried to install it on a 4gb usb key using a guide i got from linux forum but I had problems with the key itself. I now want to set up a dual boot on the laptop. Can anyone who has done this please let me know of any pitfalls i should know about. I have plenty of free space to partition for ubuntu. I can dedicate most of the D drive to it. HP pavillion dv8000, 2Gb ram, Dual core. Any help greatly appreciated. Thank you

humbert

I haven't done that with ubuntu but in general the biggest concern is partitioning. Be careful you don't delete your windows partition. Next to that is the bootloader, generally grub, if you make a mistake there the computer wont boot. However you can recover from that quite easily and to the best of my knowledge ubuntu takes care of installing the bootloader for you anyway.

Just take your time and you should be fine.

PogMoThoin

Hey m8, grub loader will take care of your install, only thing you gotta worry bout is getting the partioning right.

Good luck

Pog

Tobias Greeshman

You actually have a similar laptop to mine, so I'll tell you how I did it.

- Make sure your windows partition is defragged, just to be safe.
- Firstly put in the ubuntu live cd and install normally. It comes to the screen about partitioning, and I resized the windows partition and created the extra linux partitions as necessary.
- Then just tell it what to format these linux partitions as, and what to mount them as (root, home, usr, swap, etc.)
- Then it'll install and pick up your windows partition, and install a program called grub, overwriting your windows bootloader, and you'll be able to load both os's.

bandit197

Cheers for the help guys, Im backing up now and starting the install. Ill update this thread to tell you how things are working out

bman

Bit late to tell you now given you've already started, but you should probably create two partitions for linux data. One for / (root) and one for /home (where all your documents, music etc. goes). Then when your upgrading to a newer OS you can leave all your data on the machine and just wipe the / parition. I didn't do this the first time but have ever since. Makes life easier.

Capt'n Midnight

Usually I'd resize the NTFS partition to free up space.
Remove any crud from windows to free space and then defrag it first.
Use gparted to resize the partition.

Many distros will give you the option of using the largest free space so less worries about overwriting.

If you want to share data , the propietry NTFS format can be written to by a few of the latest ones. Or http://www.fs-driver.org will allow windows to see ext3 volumes.

bandit197

I got it installed without any hiccups. practically installed itself. Im converted! What a great os. Thanks

hamster

How much did you allocate to your /home partition? <1Gb? I'd hate to waste too much space, if I don't get it balanced right. ie, depending on how much I install under /usr/local/bin. Most of my media is mapped through the windows partition (read only NTFS).

bandit197

hamster wrote: »

How much did you allocate to your /home partition? <1Gb? I'd hate to waste too much space, if I don't get it balanced right. ie, depending on how much I install under /usr/local/bin. Most of my media is mapped through the windows partition (read only NTFS).

I have two 60GB hard drives in the laptop. I installed it on one drive giving it all of the drive. I had this done before I read Bmans reply. Try a post on the linux forums, I found them great.