Famico
August 20th, 2009, 10:35 AM
I'd like to preface this by saying I have learned a lot by reading through some of the other topics here, but haven't found something that exactly relates to what I am doing. Also, I'd like to say that I think of myself as having a decent understanding of computers, but not too extensively an understanding of Linux. Anyway...
My goal is to tripple boot Windows 7, Windows XP, and Ubuntu 9.04. If it makes any difference (I don't think it should) I am running an Acer Aspire One, model ZG5. Now, The Aspire One came preloaded with Windows XP. I made a new partition on the drive by splitting the XP partition in GParted, and I installed Windows Seven onto that. At this point, using Windows Seven's boot menu I can switch back and forth between XP and 7 at will.
Here is where I am stuck.
I have the layout of my partitions as:
Partition | File System | Label | Size
/dev/sda1 | fat32 | PQSERVICE | 4.88GiB (Guessing something from Acer)
/dev/sda2 | ntfs | ACER | 89.98GiB (My Windows XP Partition)
/dev/sda4 | extended | | 13.69GiB
-- /dev/hda6 | ext3 | | 11.72GiB (Want to use for Ubuntu)
-- /dev/sda5 | linux-swap | | 1.95GiB
/dev/sda3 | ntfs | win7 | 46.51GiB (My Windows 7 Partition)
Here is a picture to aid,
http://kimag.es/share/57942105.png
So now I'm wondering how to go about installing Ubuntu. I am okay with keeping the Windows 7 boot loader and having GRUB installed to go between Ubuntu and the Windows 7 boot loader where I can choose between 7 and XP (which I hear is pretty common) or having GRUB give me the option to select any of the three (which I hear is harder to pull off).
I go into the installation, but on the preparing diskspace screen, the installer doesn't recognize the drives correctly. It thinks sda1 is Windows NT/2000/XP, sda2 is Windows Vista (Maybe Vista dumped the loader here? I don't know), and it just identifies the rest of the drives by sda[insert number here], even the actual vista installation.
Here is a picture to show you what I mean,
http://kimag.es/share/21698934.png
So besides that nonsense, in the Ubuntu installation there is the option for "install them side by side choosing between them each startup" and when I click forward to that I get a little popup that states "Before you can select a new partition size, any previous changes have to be written to disk. You cannot undo this operation". So I didn't want to do something I couldn't undo without knowing exactly what I was doing and possibly writing something to a strange partition.
I could also do the third option of Specifying the partitions manually, but I don't get any info about installing GRUB, so I don't want to install Ubuntu to my ext3 partition and then be unable to boot it, or perhaps the system will only want to boot Ubuntu and nothing else.
Now I'm looking for guidence, do I go install them side by side and write the changes, or do I go manually specify the partitions. And if I go with the latter, where and at what point does GRUB come in to the picture?
Thank you for reading.
My goal is to tripple boot Windows 7, Windows XP, and Ubuntu 9.04. If it makes any difference (I don't think it should) I am running an Acer Aspire One, model ZG5. Now, The Aspire One came preloaded with Windows XP. I made a new partition on the drive by splitting the XP partition in GParted, and I installed Windows Seven onto that. At this point, using Windows Seven's boot menu I can switch back and forth between XP and 7 at will.
Here is where I am stuck.
I have the layout of my partitions as:
Partition | File System | Label | Size
/dev/sda1 | fat32 | PQSERVICE | 4.88GiB (Guessing something from Acer)
/dev/sda2 | ntfs | ACER | 89.98GiB (My Windows XP Partition)
/dev/sda4 | extended | | 13.69GiB
-- /dev/hda6 | ext3 | | 11.72GiB (Want to use for Ubuntu)
-- /dev/sda5 | linux-swap | | 1.95GiB
/dev/sda3 | ntfs | win7 | 46.51GiB (My Windows 7 Partition)
Here is a picture to aid,
http://kimag.es/share/57942105.png
So now I'm wondering how to go about installing Ubuntu. I am okay with keeping the Windows 7 boot loader and having GRUB installed to go between Ubuntu and the Windows 7 boot loader where I can choose between 7 and XP (which I hear is pretty common) or having GRUB give me the option to select any of the three (which I hear is harder to pull off).
I go into the installation, but on the preparing diskspace screen, the installer doesn't recognize the drives correctly. It thinks sda1 is Windows NT/2000/XP, sda2 is Windows Vista (Maybe Vista dumped the loader here? I don't know), and it just identifies the rest of the drives by sda[insert number here], even the actual vista installation.
Here is a picture to show you what I mean,
http://kimag.es/share/21698934.png
So besides that nonsense, in the Ubuntu installation there is the option for "install them side by side choosing between them each startup" and when I click forward to that I get a little popup that states "Before you can select a new partition size, any previous changes have to be written to disk. You cannot undo this operation". So I didn't want to do something I couldn't undo without knowing exactly what I was doing and possibly writing something to a strange partition.
I could also do the third option of Specifying the partitions manually, but I don't get any info about installing GRUB, so I don't want to install Ubuntu to my ext3 partition and then be unable to boot it, or perhaps the system will only want to boot Ubuntu and nothing else.
Now I'm looking for guidence, do I go install them side by side and write the changes, or do I go manually specify the partitions. And if I go with the latter, where and at what point does GRUB come in to the picture?
Thank you for reading.