Finally going through with Ubuntu install, quick question before I mess anything up.

I don't know if you guys remember me but I had a pretty lengthy questions thread a while back. I am finally getting to my Ubuntu install and have a few more quick questions. Here's the situation I'm in right now:

I purchased an HP dv6000t which came factory installed with Vista. I did a clean Vista install and made the vista partition 80 GB out of 160 GB (technically 150). That went smoothly enough and everything was functional after a bit of driver fidgetting. So then I popped in the GParted Live CD to set aside some fat 32 space to share stuff between OS's. While in GParted i noticed that there was a 1 MB slice of unallocated space before my Vista install. I figured this had something to do with the booting and didn't worry. So I went ahead and made a 20 GB chunk fat 32, leaving about 50 GB for Ubuntu. It went fine except now there is a 4 MB slice of unallocated space before the fat 32 partition as well. So on gparted my hard drive looks as follows from left to right:

l [1 MB unallocated] l [80 GB Vista] l [4 MB unallocated] l [20 GB fat 32] l [50 GB unallocated left for Ubuntu] l

The only reason this worries me is that I know you can only have something like 4 partitions max, so do those small unallocated chunks count as partitions which would make me run into problems later when creating my root partition and my linux swap partition? I should be able to go back into GParted, delete the fat 32 partition and try again. I am even willing to reinstall Vista since it wasn't too bad and I haven't put much time into it thus far.

What should i do! Thanks for the help in advance.

 

Hi there,
first: I'm an Ubuntu newbie too (actually I was able to finally boot Ubuntu last night thanks to the help from this forum).

Regarding the swap it's my understanding that you can also use a swap file; supposedly it's a little bit slower, but not that much.

Have a look at this documentation.

(as a matter of fact I didn't have a partition available when I installed Ubuntu and thus decided to create the swap file rather then a new partition, already have way too many between my 2 HD)

Any other opinions regarding partitions and swaps out there?

Regards

 

I wouldn't worry too much about the unallocated space, I believe it is a consequence of the way Microsoft choose to define their partition. The design of the PC means that you can have upto 4 primary partitions. You can create a special primary partition that is called an extended partition, and inside that you can then create lots of secondary partitions. (People have written whole articles on this stuff, so I sure you'll have lots of unanswered questions - google is your friend as they say)

What I would do is delete the FAT32 partition.
Create an Extended partition.
Create your FAT32 partition as a secondary partition using some of the space in the extended partition.
Leave the rest of the unallocated space in the extended partition available for your linux distros.

(Personally, in my extended partition, I usually start by creating three secondary partitions, 1) root partition, 2) swap partition, and 3) home partition). How much you allocate for each partition, and whether you choose to allocate all the remaining unallocated space can be a matter of much discussion!

 

I don't think you would ever need FAT32 at all. Just delete it. There are ways to get Linux access NTFS, and get Vista/XP to access ext3.

 

Yup, rockharder is absolutely correct. I've only been using Ubuntu for a couple days and I managed to get my Linux to read and write to my windows partition Just use the Synaptic Package Manager and search for ntfs-config.

 

For Windows-to-Linux access, install this program (I've used it, so I can assure you that its good): http://www.fs-driver.org/

The downside is that it only provides read-only capabilities. Maybe someone else can propose an alternative.

For Linux-to-Windows access, the package ntfs-3g will provide you with both read and write capabilities. Simply install it by opening the Terminal application and typing:

sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g

Hope that helps