Installing Ubuntu

corblimey

I was just installing v8 and am confused by the partitioning. I understand the concept and all that, but my machine gives me the following:

/dev/sda
  /dev/sda1  fat32  7845MB
  /dev/sda2  ntfs   242562MB
  free space        7MB

/dev/sdb
  /dev/sdb1  fat32  41159MB

Now I have a 300gig h/d which was partitioned when I bought it. C is where I do my work and D is a restore drive or something - to be honest, I've never paid it much attention. So that explains the /dev/sda and dev/sdb but the contents of dev/sda confuses me. What is the 7gig FAT32 partition? What is 'free space'?

I assume I need to create a new partition for my installation, but I'm only allowed to edit the /sda2 partition and add a new one on the 'free space', with a max of 7MB, which is obviously no good. Can I delete the 'free space' partition, and this will open up /sda2 to be added to?

(Note: I use Win XP and want to create a dual boot loader, so I'm planning on leaving 30gig for Win XP, using 120 FAT32 for shared files and the rest is Ext3 for Ubuntu, so my first step will be to create I guess about 190g partition hanging of /sda2)

stereo_steve

I'm confused, you bought a 300 GIG hard disk and added it to the computer? So you have two drives in there now? The 40 gig drive was your original drive?

Just to answer your questions, that 7mb is just free, you can do what ever you want with it, delete it , add it to any of the partitions. its just 7Mb unallocated hard drive space.

i'd recommend to stay away from the FAT partition you are planning. I'd use NTFS or ext3. they are much better filesystems and are both readable by both OS's ( Windows just needs a little help )

I'm guessing that windows is your primary Os and thats what you know the best. Why not boot it up go to Control Pannel -> Administrative Tools -> Disk drives and take a look at the partitions. If the 7 gig partition doesn't have a drive letter right click it and allocate one.

i'd put money on your 7gig partition being the restore partition. That /dev/sdb is a totally different device from your 300gig drive. Do you have an external drive connected via usb or something?

Let us know how it goes. Your gonna love linux!

corblimey

I have only one drive on this machine, about 250gig.

Yeah, I was a little confused myself by it, but you're right, sdb is a 40gig external h/d so I can forget about that. 7gig is my D 'recovery' drive. So that leaves 225gig for C, of which Windows is reporting 208gig (92%) is free. So how come I only have 7MB free space? I've tried defragging C, but it's made sod all difference.

You're probably right on the whole FAT32 v Ext3 thing aswell, I guess I was just erring on teh side of caution for my first installation.

stereo_steve

That 7MB free space is unallocated space on your harddrive not being used by anything at the moment. The 92% that windows is referring to as free means that 92% of the of the 225GB partition is free. The 7MB is essentially wasted as windows doesn't see this 7MB.

You then need to resize your NTFS partition to 30 GB like you want. This will then leave 195GB of free space which we can then allocate to other partions, eg a shared partition and a partition for ubuntu.

I googled an article ....

http://www.zyxware.com/articles/2007/12/27/windows/installing-ubuntu-laptops-single-ntfs-partition-windows-xp-or-vista


Boot into the Live CD. If the required package (ntfstools/ntfsprogs) is not present in the live CD, install it with apt-get. for example for ntfstools

Open a terminal and type
sudo apt-get ntfstools

Using ntfsresize is again simple. Run the following to find out how small can you actually resize the NTFS filesystem to. If your NTFS partition is not /dev/hda1 replace it with the correct device name.

sudo ntfsresize -if /dev/sdb2

Now select the size of the partition that you would like to maintain for the NTFS partition and then set this size for the filesystem. Add atleast another 5-15GB free space to the smallest size found from above for the the NTFS partition for use in the Windows OS. Running the following command will resize the NTFS filesystem for you.

sudo ntfsresize -f -s 30G /dev/sdb2

Assuming that you did not get any errors in the above process you have successfully resized and shrunk the NTFS filesystem. At this point you can reboot the system (into Windows) and check to see if your filesystem resize was successfully done.

Be warned though that this process I have never done. It *should* work but things invariably go wrong with computers!! So ask your self if windows got muck up would it be the end of the world? If you have trouble with those three commands pop up a message here and we'll help you out.

corblimey

Thanks for the link. I'm currently trying the gparted liveCD to see if I can shrink it that way, but I'll be back if it doesn't help.