4 primary partitions - which is best to be removed/changed into secondary?

**mastablasta** · November 4th, 2012

Thanks both. It seems windows move to logical seems a goo dand easier idea to do (especially since the tools exists that tranforms it).

i already made recovery disks and i will maybe borrow an external drive (if they still have some free space on it) to create disk image using redobackup.

then update BIOS with latest oupdate offered by HP updater.

transform windows partition into logical one (using that tool), shrink it and then install Kubuntu to newly made disk space.

windows should work, linux should work, HP quickweb linux should work (maybe if it uses it's own boot otherwise via GRUB ), HP diagnostic tools should work, restore should work.

now to find the time to do all this....

i already tested Kubutnu 64bit and it's superfast on the mashine, so can't wait to install it..

**jerome1232** · November 4th, 2012

quickweb does work on mine btw, I forgot about that, I hardly ever use it.

**23senick** · November 4th, 2012

I have a dm1 and faced the same issue. I'm sure people here have given good solutions, here's how mine is configured, in case its of interest. My configuration may not be ideal but it does work without issues. Definitely agree you should make windows backup discs.

sda4 is the extended partition. I think I copied HP tools to another memory and then used sda4 to create and re-size partitions. I figured the HP tools was the thing I could most afford to lose, and that there would always be ways to re-build if it went wrong (from recovery or downloads).

Within the extended partition I have sda5, 6, 7 and 8. These provide space for my main ubuntu system, linux-swap, and I re-copied HP tools in one of these. I used Puppy Linux gparted to re-partition and re-size. Best tip I found was always leaving gaps at start and finish of partitions to enable later re-sizing, though I guess that if you're thinking of playing with partitions you know this.

One other observation - which wireless card do you have? Hope it isn't the Broadcom 4313. It's workable on mine but niggly, and there are many posts from fellow strugglers.

**mastablasta** · August 11th, 2013

ok so after saving up some money i finally managed to buy an external disk to backup the data. i changed windows partition to logical and i did the repartitioning and this is the current situation: http://ubuntuone.com/2UwHZPUf40LfmMCPVUtdMB

now my two questions to dual booters and others that already fiddled with this:

1. can i simply select use largest free space during install? i.e. does grub know where it has to go?
2. do you think it would be better to create another logical DATA partition formatted in NTFS and reduce the linux partition? i still intend to use windows 7 on this netbook but at the moment i do not know to what extent... i know i will need windows for online banking since xp will not be supported long and i can't afford security hole with online banking. i also do not know how well the battery will do in linux. i know it lasts very long in windows7.

basically i am looking for some advice and ideas.

EDIT: the wifi card is 03:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR9485 Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01)

**oldfred** · August 11th, 2013

Yes you can use auto install into free space. But it will just auto fill with sizes it chooses for swap & / (root). I prefer to set those sizes myself either in advance with gparted or during install.
I normally suggest the shard NTFS data partition. I still have the one from when I used XP, but will evenually move data to Linux partition as I do not boot XP anymore.

I do all my online banking with Firefox in Linux. I think it was New Zealand came out and said do not use Windows for any banking transactions. Any bank that forces you to only use Windows is a bank who's security would concern me.

**mastablasta** · August 11th, 2013

hmm. yes might be better to create a separate data paritition and maybe reduce the linux partition. especially since i read sometimes windows can act strange after being accessed from linux. but we will see... it's all much easier now that i have a disk to backup to.

the bank uses chips in USB and they need windows drivers to work (no android, no mac, no linux). so the way it all works is you need to insert the chip and eneter a password to access it in order to sign documents. it's only for the pro version for companies. and it is largest bank here and has probably the best suport for companies. i mean other companies also support it. so if you need accountignprogramme that will do everything online it will support this bank. another thing is they have offices everywhere, while some other banks really don't. and even when they do their working hours are even weirder than here. well let's see if bank will fail since they are the one causing economical troubles in my country (too many generous credits that were never repayed). so online banking is the least of their worries.

for home users it's not a problem as they use a normal certificate that you sign with password and a few other security measures when doing transfers to new account. that one should work fine in Linux and Firefox. and so far as i know it's security was breached once before via phishing. but they've added more security since then.

after this one is done - the old yellow got 2 GB more and it's time for a dual boot with winXP there... that one will be easier. as it's already have system data and something else partition that is basically 25 GB of emtpy disk space.

all i know is i've tried Kubuntu 13.04 on the netbook and it's so much faster than win7 and with most effects turned on and opensource drivers...