[CptBlack]

Hi, I'm setting up a dual boot with vista and ubuntu. I have just installed vista after reformatting my hard drive (60 gb)

Having loaded the ubuntu live cd, I'm struggling to understand the partition wizard in ubuntu. Could someone offer some advice on using this please?

In a previous incarnation of vista, I tried using both the vista partioner in disk manager and diskpart neither of which worked which is why I'm trying to use the ubuntu version.

Cheers
CB

[CouchMaster]

I think Ubuntu uses gparted
http://manual.sidux.com/en/part-gparted-en.htm

[saikee]

No

Vista now has a resizer in its disk management program. Vista now keeps a copy of the partition and the bugger checks it on every boot up. It can refuse to boot if its partition has been resized without its knowledge, all in the name of security!

Therefore I strongly advise resizing of a Vista partition should be done with Vista's own resizer in the Disk Management program. It is actually a lot faster than Gparted and the result is guaranteed. Gparted if worked out could still requires Vista to re-activate and that beats the object of the exercise.

Once unallocated space available for partition creation I recommend boot up Ubuntu as a Live CD and use its terminal program cfdisk in Ubuntu coupled with fdisk to give the second opinion. "cfdisk /dev/sda" to partition hard disk sda and "fdisk -l" to see the current partitions in every disk.

A ubuntu needs about 10Gb for installation and a 1Gb swap. Any partition created by cfdisk is automatically Type 83 suitable for Linux installation. For swap a user needs to overwrite the partition type as 82.

In Ubuntu installation just select manually in the partitioning, highlight the 10Gb partition just created, used as "Ext3" (=asking the installer to format it in Ext3 filing system) an mount as / (=as the mounting point of the root of Ubuntu filing system).

[CptBlack]

Hi, I used the vista resizer to shrink the partition and then used ubuntu to sort out the unallocated space. I think I read somewhere that ubuntu likes to use a seperate partition to store docs etc than the boot partition. Is this true? If so, how do I go about setting this up? I also have an external hard drive that I would like to use for ubuntu, how do I format this so it is the right file system?

On another tack, after installing updates for ubuntu, it has added some extra options to my dual-boot menu. Using the instructions given in my tutorial to install ubuntu, I have copied the menu.lst into a different folder and have attached it below. Is everything ok with it?

Cheers,
CB

[saikee]

It is a good practice to separate one's personal data from an operating system, be it a Linux or a MS Windows, so that when the system goes down or unbootable one can still access the data with another system, say by a Live CD.

The other advantage is when one wants to back up it is a lot easier and quicker to back up personal data without an operating system attached to it because its footprint will be a lot smaller.

Before a hard disk can be used in a Linux it must have partitions created first. Secondly the partition must be formatted with a filing system. Thirdly that partition must be mounted.

The first two operations can be achieved by gparted and the version inside Ubuntu is good enough for this purpose. To mount sysem manually in ubuntu, say for partition sdb1

sudo su
mkdir /mnt/sdb1
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb1

To mount the same partition automatically one edits the entries in /etc/fstab.

The alternatives given by Ubuntu menu.lst are for booting different kernel within Ubuntu. Use the default one always.

[CptBlack]

Hi, thanks for that - very useful. I have vista and ubuntu working together now. I'm trying to shrink my main partition with ubuntu on to have a seperate partition for the documents/shared files between windows and ubuntu. However the resize/move option is greyed out from the partition menu. Do I need to boot from the livecd to resize the partition?

Cheers,
CB

[CptBlack]

Also, will I be able to use gparted to partition and format my external hard drives into fat32 so I can use them with ubuntu.

Cheers,
CB

[saikee]

Yes for the 2 counts