[howlleo]

I was looking forward to clearing Vista off my PC and installing XP and Ubuntu dual boot, but my XP CD is OEM and my warranty is void if I mess with partitions, sooo...

HP partitions the drive and puts a backup copy of the drive on the second partition. It's about 10 GB large.

Rather suspiciously, though, the partition appears as the G: drive in My Computer.

Question: does anyone know if that's a 'real' partition, and if so, can I write Ubuntu over it and run the Linux distro out of that partition? Or would I need to reformat the entire drive?

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hi, welcome to geektogo, not sure myself but is there a way to ghost your system using norton ghost or acronis before you do anything, and then take it from there knowing that you can return the system back to what it was, or if in the case that this is a laptop, one could just swap the harddrive for another and use that instead, then if anything went wrong, one puts back the original harddrive to get it repaired since the partitions are unchanged as required, but I would wait for someone else here who know exactly or who has brighter ideas than me, thanks

[fleamailman]

hi, welcome to geektogo, not sure myself but is there a way to ghost your system using norton ghost or acronis before you do anything, and then take it from there knowing that you can return the system back to what it was, or if in the case that this is a laptop, one could just swap the harddrive for another and use that instead, then if anything went wrong, one puts back the original harddrive to get it repaired since the partitions are unchanged as required, but I would wait for someone else here who know exactly or who has brighter ideas than me, thanks

[dsenette]

........i...well...i don't know what to say....that's a smashing idea flea

either with an LT or a desktop...you could just pull the current drive out of the system...and then buy a new drive to install the new OS's on...and if you ever need to have your warranty...just put the other drive back in....

[fleamailman]

thanks dsenette(great mod)

back to the question, a partition 10gb is far too much since my machine runs great with only 6gb, kubuntu is about 1gb once installed though ubuntu I checking up now.

I have not got windows installed but I imagine that you will need a program that mounts ext2 and ext3 linux partitions from windows, again if someone has a better windows program than this please spill beans

http://www.fs-driver.org/index.html

also please try the live CD for a while before installing since there may be driver problems and the distro might not be right for your system, in that case there are many other to choose from rather than bashing ones head trying to get the driver for the system

please post back on how you got along and I hope it goes well for you

Edited by fleamailman, 21 August 2007 - 01:42 PM.

[fleamailman]

flea gets it wrong again, having check up its more like the following

My experience with one each of Feisty Kubuntu and Ubuntu is they first install at 3.x GB, and then when you start installing packages they can grow past 4GB and close to 5GB. If you periodically clean up the unused residuals from package installations, it seems that you can keep it down toward the 3.5 - 4GB size. So I have been recommending 7 GB for the root partition -- I assume that is the underlying question. You could probably get by with 6GB, but Linux doesn't like full filesystems ....

I don't see a noticeable difference in size between Kubuntu and Ubuntu.

then again I don't load my system with programs, this is how my drive looks

fleamailman@fleamailman-laptop:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 5.3G 2.3G 2.8G 45% /

reading the details as the drive being dev/hda1, size 5.3g, used 2.3g, available 2.8g, etc.,

Edited by fleamailman, 21 August 2007 - 02:24 PM.

[howlleo]

Well, I'm not looking to splurge much more money on hard drives, honestly. Especially for laptops; I've heard they're expensive.

So my real question is, (and maybe I should take this to the Vista forum? Please let me know) can I boot off the Ubuntu CD and install it in the second partition on top of the recovery data?

[fleamailman]

checking that up, but eitherway you cannot avoid the point you stated that if you change the partitions you effect your warranty, thanks

[silverbeard]

quote]Well, I'm not looking to splurge much more money on hard drives, honestly. Especially for laptops; I've heard they're expensive. [/quote]



What do you consider expensive?
$65 for 100 gigs isn't bad IMO. And $13 for an External Case seems a good investment to me.

It's a matter of how you want to use "Your Computer".

Edited by silverbeard, 22 August 2007 - 11:16 AM.

[fleamailman]

just leave the vista recovery partition and its data alone, use a GParted live CD to shrink the "big" Vista partition, then make an extended partition out of the rest of the space on that hard drive. Make 3 logical partitions in the extended partition, like so:

"/"
"/home"
"swap"

And install ubuntu in there.

the above is what I got but it sounds a little hard on someone new to it, so I am checking a bit more, thanks

btw the link to gparted is
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

but this still doesn't solve the warranty problem so I suggest buying a harddrive because(once the original harddrive passes its warranty) if you put it into an external harddrive caddie(and format it in ntfs) as silverbeard suggests it then becomes a extra storage device like those external harddrives people buy, besides my signature below says how I feel about having the recovery on the only harddrive one is using

Edited by fleamailman, 22 August 2007 - 11:41 AM.

[howlleo]

Well, I wouldn't want to be swapping hard drives in and out, for sure. But if I could attach it externally and boot off that, well, that would be cool indeed. Are you saying that that's possible, silverbeard?

Thanks for doing the looking, fleamailman. I appreciate it, and am waiting for details. Partitioning a partition into three doesn't mean much to me... or would it all make sense once I have qparted running?

[fleamailman]

thanks, what is being suggested is taking out the harddrive only once (not swapping), placing the new harddrive in the computer, installing window XP first and then simply installing ubuntu after that, this avoids complications and is gui style great for someone doing it the first time

so if you do replace the harddrive as suggested above, you will have your original harddrive in hand, and that original harddrive can just be kept somewhere for the duration of the warranty, however once the warranty is up, you can then place it into an external harddrive caddie and format it into ntfx, and it becomes an external harddrive much like a big USB key but with a lot more capacity, eitherway once the warranty on your computer is up I suggest you have two harddrives because any harddrive no matter new or old can die taking your data with it, backing up data to two drive(cross backing up) is the way to go

[silverbeard]

Yes USB booting has been available for sometime and several small sized distros have had mount scripts for USB installs for a couple of years. PCLinux has had a USB install for the last two releases. It's a good way to play without committing to your internal hard drive. The speed is not as fast as an internal install but faster than CD and still blindingly fast comparerd to Windows.