ubunut 10.04 lts / Partitions

[daveedking]

well -KG- here is what im going to do...
boot into win 7, delete 8 gig linux partition with EASEUS partition manager, reboot fix grub error /fixboot rec, boot back into win 7, create 10 gig etx4partiton, boot into live cd and install ubuntu 10.04 lts on that 10 gig etx4 partition....
any problems here >? will i get the full 10 gigs for my root (file system) >?
thanks...
-daveed-

[jerome1232]

That seems overly complicated to me, you could just boot the live cd and use the manual partitioner during installation.

Of course if your more comfortable using the partition manager you are used to by all means you can do it that way. Everything you said sounds fine, although I don't understand why you need to fix grub after deleting the partition, the live cd installer should take care of reinstalling grub for you, and you don't need to have grub functioning at all to boot the live cd.

[-kg-]

Sorry I'm a little late getting back to this, but:

Probably the easiest way to do what you want to do is to boot into Win 7 (though you could boot to the Live CD and do this with GPartEd), delete the all the Ubuntu partitions you made with Easus, then reboot into the Live CD, install, and, when you get to the Partitioning step, choose "Install in Largest Contiguous Free Space" (or whatever it is now...I've not installed Lucid yet).

That way, the installer will create all the requisite partitions for you automatically without the need to manually create them and mark their mount points (unless you want to create them and mark their mount points for the learning experience). That would be the easiest way to do it, and it would install right with no "special considerations."

You realize that you'll need to at least create a swap partition in addition to your root partition, right? That will cut into the free space you have for your root. The conventional recommended amount is 1 1/2 X the amount of RAM installed in your machine. In my case, since I have 2 GB of RAM, my swap would be 3 GB. If you leave 10 GB of free space and have the same RAM, you would have 7 GB left for your root partition.

However, a lot of the time you can use less than this, especially if you have a fair amount of RAM and don't use hibernate, where the contents of memory are stored in the swap area, or very memory intensive software, where portions of memory are swapped out.

Sometimes it's a matter of experimenting to see how little you can get away with. In the couple of years I've been using Ubuntu, I have used the swap partition so little that I almost don't need one; however, I have plenty of hard drive space, so I keep it around.

[daveedking]

hey ubuntu members thanks for the help...
i took 10.04 off my laptop "runs 2 hot"
On my desktop ubuntu is still the best linux distro.. "linux for humans"
i was never able to resize the partition even after i changed the ntfs to ex4...
thanks a million 2 the ubuntu forums...
P.S. Ubuntu runs hot on laptops <>~~~
-daveed-

[-kg-]

i was never able to resize the partition even after i changed the ntfs to ex4...

As I said, you needed to delete all the partitions, except for the one for Windows, before you started. You couldn't resize the partition you created because you had no free space to expand it into.

If you look at the image of your partitions that you posted, you will see that, at the end of your drive, you have an extended partition, which contains your sda5 and sda6 as logical partitions. There is no space into which to expand your sda2 partition, no matter how it's formatted.

You needed to at least delete those two partitions and the extended partition in order to expand sda2. The reason you would need to delete the extended partition is that you cannot expand a primary partition into the space contained by an extended partition. You would either need to create an extended partition, then create the ext4 partition inside it as a logical partition, or create both your root and swap partitions as primary partitions.

That's why I said it would be best to just delete all the partitions and let the installer do it. That, or if you want to learn partitioning operations, to read on the "How To Partition" link in my signature block, which will show you basic partitioning operations and what you can and can't do.

P.S. Ubuntu runs hot on laptops <>~~~
-daveed-

It doesn't run hot on my laptop. As matter of fact, it runs cooler than Windows ever did. But there are differences between laptops...perhaps in the "cooling" department, as well.

[daveedking]

you cannot expand a primary partition into the space contained by an extended partition.

dont mean 2 keep this going but why>? what cant i expand a primary partition into the space contained by an extended partition.

[srs5694]

you cannot expand a primary partition into the space contained by an extended partition.

dont mean 2 keep this going but why>? what cant i expand a primary partition into the space contained by an extended partition.

Why are you boldfacing everything? There's no need to; it's just a bit annoying (IMHO, of course).

To answer your question, though, an extended partition is a special type of primary partition, and primary partitions may not overlap with one another. Suppose for the sake of argument that you deliberately misconfigured a partition table so that a primary partition (let's say it's /dev/sda2) extends a few sectors into the following extended partition (/dev/sda3). An extended partition serves as a placeholder for logical partitions, and in fact the first sector of an extended partition is a definition of the first logical partition on the disk (/dev/sda5), as well as a pointer to the sector that defines the next logical partition (/dev/sda6). On this misconfigured disk, though, this first sector belongs to both the /dev/sda2 primary partition and the /dev/sda3 extended partition. This might seem to work for a while, but if /dev/sda2 starts to fill up, chances are that sector would end up being overwritten. It now contains garbage, from an extended partition point of view, meaning that the computer will no longer know where /dev/sda5 is or how large it is. Furthermore, the link to /dev/sda6 will be lost, and with it the links to all subsequent logical partitions. Thus, having a primary partition overlap with the start of an extended partition runs the risk of losing all of your logical partitions. Depending on how much they overlap, the /dev/sda2 primary partition might also overlap one or more logical partition(s), too, which will wreak even more havoc.

In practice, this limitation isn't so awful. If you've got a bit of free space outside of the extended partition and a bit of free space inside the extended partition, it's easy enough to resize the extended partition (using GParted or similar tools) so that all of the free space resides either inside or outside the extended partition. You can then create one or more logical or primary partitions, respectively, that fill all of this free space.

[jerome1232]

Afaik all partition information (the partition table) is stored in the boot sector of the drive, the boot sector is the first 512 bytes of a drive. As you can imagine only a limited amount of information can be stored in 512 bytes, in fact you can only have 4 primary partitions on a disk.

To get around that they come up with extended partitions, which store more information outside of the boot sector. You can only have one extended partition on a drive (the extended partition takes up the room a primary would have in the boot sector, meaning you can have 3 primary partitions and 1 extended partition) but they in turn can store information about multiple logical partitions ( a logical partition is just a partition inside of the extended partition) contained within them.

I hope that adds to the description above a bit.

[daveedking]

thanks for the run down coffee_geeks...
we can mark this thread solved..

P.S. please forgive me boldness..(text)
-love ubuntu 4 desktops-