problem installing PRECISE in Win 7 laptop

[mark allyn]

Good evening, oldfred,

A follow on to the matter of getting HP recovery disks. After quite a frustrating session on HP's on-line site I finally got the phone number to call for HP notebook (ProBook 4525s, Win 7 32-bit) and a helpful rep placed the order. Arrive in 2-3 business days, price is $10.60. The phone number is 1-800-888-0262.

Thought you and others might like to know this.

Regards,
Mark Allyn

[Bartender]

Sorry, mark, when I got home I shoulda dug up my paperwork and posted back with the HP phone #.

There's a possibility that installing from the discs will remove some of the partitions. I'm not sure about that. My Win7, non-UEFI 4520S has one big partition now after I reinstalled from the recovery discs that HP sent me. But I don't remember how bad it was beforehand.

Dangit, I'm lost again - did we establish that yours boots from an UEFI partition, rather than BIOS?

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that you may - or may not - get a partition or two back by reinstalling Windows from the recovery discs. I just don't know for sure. If it's UEFI you might wind up with as few as two partitions. One for EFI and one for Windows.

Have you signed up at the HP forums? I've gotten help there. The HP forums can be hit-or-miss. There's less traffic than here, and I've seen questions that seemed completely valid go unanswered. But I was on there not too long ago asking about a dc7800 desktop, and one of the senior guys stuck with me for several days until we'd resolved it.

[oldfred]

The fdisk showed 4 primary partitions, so it is BIOS/MBR.

If you have a full recovery set of DVDs you do not have to keep the recovery partition, most suggest backing up and copy the HP utilities into the main partition. On user said he copied back to a logical partition and the HP utilities still worked, others have not missed HP's utilities.

Use Windows to shrink the Windows partition to make more space, but not to create partitions. You can partition in advance with gparted, partition during install with Something Else or use auto install which just installs a default / (root) & swap into the unallocated space. I usually suggest manual partitioning & adding /home and if dual booting with Windows a shared NTFS data partition. These all are logical partitions.

Several discussion and some with screen shots so you can see exactly what you will be doing.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GraphicalInstall
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WindowsDualBoot
Install Ubuntu 12.10 0 with screenshots
http://www.ubuntu.com/download/help/...desktop-latest
http://howtoubuntu.org/how-to-instal...cise-pangolin/
Install 12.04- side by side auto install with screen shots
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/installing


For the Total space you want for Ubuntu:
Ubuntu's standard install is just / (root) & swap, but it is better to add another partition for /home if allocating over 30GB.:
Ubuntu partitions - smaller root only where hard drive space is limited.
If total space less than about 30GB just use / not separate /home or standard install.
1. 10-25 GB Mountpoint / primary or logical beginning ext4(or ext3)
2. all but 2 GB Mountpoint /home logical beginning ext4(or ext3)
3. 2 GB Mountpoint swap logical

Depending on how much memory you have you may not absolutely need swap but having some is still recommended. I do not hibernate (boots fast enough for me) but if hibernating then you need swap equal to RAM in GiB not GB. And if dual booting with windows a shared NTFS partition is also recommended. But you usually cannot create that as part of the install, just leave some space. Or partition in advance (recommended).
One advantage of partitioning in advance is that the installer will use the swap space to speed up the install. Thanks Herman for the tip.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DiskSpace
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2021534

[Bartender]

Thanks, oldfred. It takes a village -

mark, if you can hang tight until the HP recovery discs arrive, I'd suggest:

1) Back up anything you can't afford to lose.
2) Reinstall Windows from the recovery discs. I'm cautiously optimistic that the recovery discs will do what they did on my 4520S - get rid of the non-essential partitions and leave you with one Windows partition, formatted as ntfs.
3) Make sure Windows works.
4) Use the Windows tools (find Administrative Tools>Computer Management>Disk Management) to Shrink the Volume.
5) Check again that Windows is working after shrinking the volume.
6) Install Ubuntu as a "genuine" dual-boot.

A variant of the above would be to use an Ubuntu LiveCD or GPartedLiveCd to create an ntfs primary partition first, then boot from the recovery discs. The recovery discs should recognize only the ntfs partition, leaving the rest of the drive alone for Linux.

Everything changes with time, and I'm not entirely sure that what worked for me a year or more ago will work for you. So the variant is offered as purely experimental! I try to avoid offering ideas that may or may not work until I know that the recipient has options, and utter failure is not the end of the world.