Partitioning Drive and Installing Ubuntu

[owenisred]

Hello,

Its been a while since I've posted here. I gave up on Ubuntu a long time ago; I was eager to use it, but I just encountered too many problems with it. Recently I was persuaded to try again, I have a windows 7 64 bit laptop, and I stuck Ubuntu onto a USB stick and changed the boot order, and currently I am running Ubuntu from that (everything looks so much nicer and smoother compared to what i remembered).

Anyway I tried installing Ubuntu from here, however there was no option to install alongside windows. Only to replace windows or to manually partition hard drive. I reduced the size of the win7 partition and now theres 100GB of free space. However when I select this and click install I get:

NO ROOT FILE SYSTEM FOUND
Please correct this from partitioning menu

I am totally unsure how to fix this, any help would be much appreciated

Thanks,
Owen.

[Basher101]

Hello, glad you found your way back to Ubuntu

can you run Gparted? it is in your applications of the Live USB you made. Just open it DO NOT CHANGE ANYTHING NOW just make a screenshot and upload it here so i can help you better.

[owenisred]

Heres the picture, thanks for the reply.

(Hope it attached right )

[Basher101]

okay from here on it is quite easy...but first, how much RAM do you have? I need to know if you need a SWAP partition or not.

[owenisred]

4GB of RAM (DDR3 I think)

[Basher101]

I personally never used more RAM with ubuntu than ~ 1.5 GB... i don't know about how you want to use it. If you do not know what SWAP is, in short your unneeded Processes get dumped there if you have too many applications to free up some RAM (this is good for older computers). 4 GB should be enough to go without a SWAP partition, but it is your call pal. Do you want it or not?

[owenisred]

I guess ill be ok without Thanks

[Basher101]

then this makes the partitioning a bit easier. Now open Gparted again, right click on your Unallocated space (the 98 GB) and choose new. There on the right you must change the type to Extended partition (you already have 4 Primary partitions and cannot add a fith). Once you have the extended partition, below it should appear the same Space (98 GB) also unallocated. Again, right click it and choose New. On the right you should see the Field "Filesystem" and next to it a box. Click the box and choose "ext4". On the top of Gparted you should see an arrow that looks like the enter key. Click it and the changes will be applied. Now you are done with the partitioning.

[owenisred]

Silly question probably, but how do I change type to extended partition? as far as i can see any time I hit new, I just get the error message saying youve got 4 primary partitions - make an extended one. No option to make an extended one

[Basher101]

Do you actually use your HP tools? or do you not ever use them at all?

p.s. forgot to ask...do you have a 64-bit system?