8.04: Installation - HP with Vista and HP recovery partiton, want to dual boot.

[brjoon1021]

Hi,

I have a new laptop that has Vista on it. I want to dual-boot Ubuntu. When I began the installation process and looked at the partitions I found that this laptop has a recovery partition where they put Vista, evidently to save on CDs. Anyway, the Disk is partitioned into one large 280 some GB NTFS from the beginning and around 12 GB NTFS following that for the recovery partition.

I don't know how to safely proceed.. To be clear, I want to keep Vista working. I assume that these are two Primary partitions already on here. I can only add one more primary, I believe. I suppose that I could try to shrink the first large NTFS primary partition and install Ubuntu on that. Will this mess up the recovery partition ? or even the OSs partition ?

Ideally, I would like to be able to have a separate data partion that is either NTFS or FAT32 to be accessed by both OSs. But, then I would be looking at adding a Logical partiton. I am not sure how I could do that safely.

Help, please

[caljohnsmith]

First off, since you have Vista on that machine, I would recommend that you use Vista's Disk Management to do your partitioning rather than Ubuntu's partition editor gparted; Vista keeps its own partition table that is independent of the main partition table in your HDD's master boot record. So in practicality that means if you use anything but Vista's Disk Management to repartition your HDD, it can end up breaking Vista until you fix Vista's partition table.

About your partitioning scheme, I would resize your huge Vista partition, create an "extended" partition (which is just the container for logical partitions), and then create as many logical partitions as you want for Ubuntu, Ubuntu's swap partition, a data partition, etc. You can have up to 4 primary partitions on your HDD, or you can have up to three 3 primary partitions and 1 extended partition, where the extended partition has up to 63 logical partitions.

Hope that helps, but if you need any more details/info don't hesitate to ask. :)

[brjoon1021]

what should the order of the partitions be ? In other words, do I want to have the two windows partitions in their current order, first and second, respectively, and add the partitions for ubuntu on AFTER them ? It seems that way to me. I probably don't want to put a partition in between the two windows partitons, eh?

[David D.]

I purchased an HP laptop with the Windows recovery partition. I used the HP instructions to burn the recovery partition data to CDs, then used the partition that had the recovery data for Ubuntu as dual boot. The only difficulty has been in getting Vista to allow enlargement of the partition containing Ubuntu.