so I tried installing ubuntu

So i was trying to dual boot ubuntu and vista on my single 160gb hdd (c:138gb, d:10gb), and failed, no damage done.
I had about 60 odd gigs of free space, as I'm new to linux, I used guided partitioning, which is supposed to resize/shrink my vista partitions and create space for ubuntu, but it didn't work. an error message came out and said something like 'size too small'.
any way too get around? I can shrink/delete my vista partitions and get about 50 gb of unallocated space, will it help?

 

I personally don't like the guided partitioning. You say that that you have Vista already on the drive and 60 GB of free space. This is more than enough for an Ubuntu install. If you want to dual boot Vista and Ubuntu, leave the Vista partition alone. I suggest you partition your drive manually. Choose the manual partition option. This should give you a graphical layout(like a horizontal bar graph) of your drive, listing what partitions you have, their sizes and free space. Find the free space bar and click on that. Partition it for ubuntu. You will be asked for the filesystem type. I like ext3. You could choose that. Once this is done proceed with the rest of the install. This will put all of ubuntu in one partition(60GB).

This is just one way to do it. You could split this 60GB of space into multiple partitions. Its up to you. I like to have a partition for /, /home and SWAP partitions.

 

Well, to rule out a few problems:
Thoroughly defrag the Vista partition, using something like JKdefrag.
Run chkdsk.
Possibly use the partitioner included with Vista.

 

thanks guys, I just defrag my disk and I'm gonna try again.

 

yeah partition with vista

 

For 60 GB of space, I would suggest creating a 25 GB root (/) partition, a SWAP partition that's twice your ram (but don't go over 2 GB of swap, as it'd just be a waste of space), and a home partition (/home) that uses the rest of the space.

The advantage of a separate /home partition is that in Linux, all your user settings are saved under the /home directory (if you had the username tianxia, it would be in /home/tianxia), meaning you can reinstall Linux and keep all your settings exactly as they were. You can even transfer the partition to a new computer's hard drive, and all your settings (including bookmarks, wallpaper, etc.) would be automagically transferred.

 

..and if you have other users, you can set their permissions to work solely in that partition, and not be able to access (and screw) the rest of your Linux install. This is why big corporations run Linux. Easy and effective security.

 

Setting up a 25GB root partition isn't a waste of space? That's just crazy... EOS!