N00b in serious need of help, several problems

[falcon61102]

For future reference, gparted is installed on the live cd... it's in the menu. Good luck.

[balaknair]

OK let's see, you said you have WinXP on 30 GB
that's here
/dev/sda1 * 1 3824 30716248+ 7 HPFS/NTFS

That's your primary partition
The rest of your drive is basically one extended partition with 47 GB
/dev/sda2 3825 9729 47431912+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA)

and some smaller partitions(the rest of it).

If as you said you have allocated 30GB for XP and the rest for Ubuntu, I guess that means you have nothing Windows related on the remaining space. So you can go ahead and remove the large 47 GB partition, and create new partitions to install Ubuntu.

The reason I'd advise installing anew is that it's simpler to just create new partitions and install to it, you get a cleaner partition table, you can create a seperate /home partition, which is easier if you want to back up or if you want to upgrad. Plus it's almost the same amount of work. And the Grub tavles are also created anew, with less chance of error.

Beyond that, it's your call.

All the best. : )

[Taxman415a]

I agree with balaknair. Verify that you don't have anything important on all those other small partitions and if not, then delete them and go with a larger one that uses up all the 47 GB remaing or so that Windows isn't using. It's not likely that the Ubuntu installer created all those small paritions, but if you really didn't know what you were doing it's possible you did.

[Drizzel]

Success! I must have been on mars last night when I was trying to do the partitioning. It was cake. I just deleted all those partitions except the xp one and everything went smooth. Thanks for your help and suggestions guys. You all deserve medals for all the help you provide on these forums!

Only thing I'm kinda curious about is when I did the update manager it pulled like 212 updates, but 42 failed. Now when I run the update manager it downloads the 42 updates that failed, but doesnt install em. It just says system is up to date. Is that normal?

[mikewhatever]

Can you post the exact error message you get. Congratulations on successful install.

[Drizzel]

It just acts like it is updating, the little download box that pops up with the progress bar and it says downloading 1,2,3,4.. of 42. "Then it says reading state information" and after that it just goes back to the update manager. It says "Your system is up to date" "The package information was last updated less than an hr ago".. I have run the updater several times trying to get it to install the 42 updates, but it wont.


Also, I hate to ask as I'm feeling so clueless right now, but.. You know how in windows you can push win+E and windows explorer comes up? Is there anything similar in Ubuntu? I cant figure out how to access my files.

[Drizzel]

Anyone know of a nice N00b guide to Ubuntu? Something like showing people who are used to windows how to do common tasks in Ubuntu.. Keyboard shortcuts, exploring files and directories like when using windows explorer, useful terminal commands etc. I found a n00b guide somewhere here on the forums yesterday, but lost the bookmark. I think it was in someones sig.

I'm loving Ubuntu, a feeling of freedom has come over me. Its so much better than windows imho.

[balaknair]

try psychocats- it's a great collection of tutorials and guides put together by aysiu, one of the admins here at ubuntuforums.
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/index.php

It certainly helped me on more than one occasion(still refer to it frequently).

[balaknair]

There's more stuff here

Keyboard shortcuts
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=50794

More shortcuts
http://ubuntu-tutorials.com/2007/02/...ot-know-about/

You can also customise keyboard shortcuts
System Menu> Preferences> Keyboard Shortcuts

[balaknair]

And regarding the updates, try this(can't say for sure if it'll work)
Open Synaptic(System menu> Administration> Synaptic Package Manager), select 'upgradable packages' and check the version you have installed to see if it's the newest version. You can also look at properties to see if there are any dependencies.

If you have an older version and it's upgradable try updating each package individually and see if it returns an error. You can also "Force Version" or mark for complete reinstallation by right clicking on it.

Hope this is helpful
All the best.