Sudhan asked:
Hi!!! Well ive been trying to install ubuntu OS with vista home premium on my Dell pc which came preinstalled with Vista OS but in vain.The problem? I do not know how to partition my hard disk.I reffered to the following website for help
http://techtipster.wordpress.com/2007/11/20/step-by-step-guide-on-installing-ubuntu-710-gutsy-gibbon-on-your-vista-computer/
as per the instructions…it said that there wud be an option called as ‘Guided – use the largest continuous free space’ but when i actually tried it out…it showed me no such option, even after shrinking my vista os volume from 90 GB to 70 GB and freeing up a 20Gb unallocated space….i tried out the manual partition option but the 20 GB unallocated space is not even shown in the options….Please Help me Out friends…….i really want to install ubuntu as early as possible
October 21st, 2008 at 2:42 am
First of all, that guide you posted is about two versions behind.
What you may be better off doing at this stage is preparing the partitions outside of the Ubuntu install. Go to the link below and download the gparted image. You can get the CD image and burn it (as an image, as you did with the Ubuntu image) to a CD. or, if your system supports booting to a USB stick, you can install it there and boot from the stick.
When you boot the CD/USB stick, it will start a stripped down Linux and run Gparted, the Gnome Partition Editor. there’s a ton of information about using it on the site.
Basically, it will start and show your current partition configuration. You can then edit, format or build a file system on your existing partitions. This will show you what you current have.
Make sure that, if you have any files on the Vista partition that you need, to save them first, just in case something goes wrong.
The Gparted tool (which is basically the same tool as on the Ubuntu CD, with a slightly different look) lets you manually make the decisions about everything.
Don’t forget that Linux works a lot better with a swap drive in a separate partition. You can make a small one while you have gparted running (2-3 GB should be fine). You should also be able to create the Linux file system on the new partition in Gparted. The data partition for Linux should be ext3 for the file system (Some might argue that Reiserfs is better, and it is in some cases, but since it’s creator is not doing life in prison for killing his wife, the future of the file system might be up in the air). You can set the swap partition as swap.
If you can’t set the file system in the partitioning, you can select them when you install Ubuntu.
By the way, you didn’t way what version of Ubuntu you have. Make sure it’s at least 8.04. The latest version 8.10, is going to be released any moment now, so you can install 8.04 or the 8.10 beta and upgrade to the latest version when it’s officially released (you do the upgrade live on the system…no reinstalling is necessary).
Hope this helps.