alexseanchai: Katsuki Yuuri wearing a blue jacket and his glasses and holding a poodle, in front of the asexual pride flag with a rainbow heart inset. (Default)
let me hear your voice tonight ([personal profile] alexseanchai) wrote in [community profile] linux4all2010-12-09 12:16 am

Trying to install Ubuntu alongside Windows XP

I've got an 80GB hard drive on this machine. One partition's Windows, one is Linux swap space left from before I reinstalled Windows, one is mostly just there, and I want to install Ubuntu on the fourth. Trouble is, every time I try, my choices are install on the whole disk and install on the whole disk. Except for the time I tried with a flash drive in; I now have a 16GB flash drive with a 10GB partition Windows recognizes and a 6GB partition from which I can boot Ubuntu.

I don't want to install on the whole 80GB disk. There's a reason I reinstalled Windows. I also don't want to boot from a USB anything, because every time I try to boot Ubuntu I have to glare at the 'This is not a bootable disk' message until I remember I need to disconnect the external hard drive before the computer thinks to check the flash drive.

What do I do?
sraun: portrait (Default)

[personal profile] sraun 2010-12-09 06:37 am (UTC)(link)
I suspect you need to use the expert install option, which will give you more control over what partitions are created and used. I hope that's enough of a hint - this is one of those things I can just do, and can never remember exactly how it works until I'm looking at it. It should drop you into a partition editor - when you're there, help or h should get you a list of commands.

Does that help?
allen: extras (extras)

[personal profile] allen 2010-12-09 03:04 pm (UTC)(link)
I haven't installed 10.10 from scratch, so I don't know exactly how the latest installer works. But from this installation walkthrough, I'd guess that what you want to do is choose 'Specify paritions manually' at the 'Allocate drive space' step. From there, you should be able to reactivate your old swap partition (if you want) and do your main install to your fourth partition.
allen: (Default)

[personal profile] allen 2010-12-09 05:49 pm (UTC)(link)
...Ok, well, that might be because your disk is fully partitioned already (?). I don't know what logic the installer uses to give its choices.

Still, if you can get to the manual partitions part then that's a good start. What you'll probably want to do is to choose that, then select the partition you want to install to (you said you have a swap partition, a 'just there' partition, and a fourth partition that you want to use, right? choose the fourth partition), choose 'Change', and then set its type to ext4 and its Mount Point to '/'. That identifies it as the root partition.

(In this case I'm using the guide at http://netgator.blogspot.com/2010/10/ubuntu-1010-installation-guide-and.html as a reference point. If your installer doesn't look like that, and/or if selecting specify partitions manually doesn't get you to a screen like this, then I'd probably need to know what Ubuntu version and media you're using for your install...)
sraun: portrait (Default)

[personal profile] sraun 2010-12-09 11:45 pm (UTC)(link)
I'm glad you got more specific help - I followed what [Unknown site tag] told you to do, and went 'yep, that's it!' - but, as I said earlier, I would have had to be looking at the partition editor to be able to do it / describe it.