9.10 partitions on install.

[t0mppa]

Ok, so I bought a netbook the other day and it currently has Windows 7 installed on it. So, today I finally got around to installing UNR on it as a dual-boot. After first having huge problems with the usb-creator on my 9.10 laptop corrupting the USB drive instead of managing to write the image on it, had to resort to Windows and UNetBootin to get the USB drive setup for a live session.

Now that I got the netbook running the live version of the UNR, I tried to go ahead and install it. Only the problem is that when the UNR install preparations come to the partitioning part, I can't choose any useful options from there. First it gives a choice to either do the partitioning automatically, where the only option is partition the entire drive into one 250 GB Ubuntu partition, or manually.

So, naturally I picked the manual version, which has worked just fine on all Ubuntu installs I've done to date on various computers. Now, I originally had shrunk the second NTFS partition (drive D) down for 17 GB to let me put UNR there. Only the problem is that the installer showed this 17 GB as unusable and refused to do anything about it.

Next I figured that the Windows disk manager probably screwed something up, booted back in there and extended the unallocated part back to the partition. Then booted back to the live UNR and tried changing the partition straight from there. It didn't help much though, if I tried leaving some space off the partition it turned into unusable again and the only way the program would allow me to make some Linux partitions is if I turn the whole 190 GB partition into ext4 (or swap or whatever).

So, what's the trick on getting UNR installed into a couple of reasonable sized partitions? Like I said earlier, Ubuntu or KUbuntu installers never had any trouble with this. Is UNR simply so limited that it cannot perform the operation?

P.S. Just in case I didn't make my case clear enough, my current partitions are:
15 GB Windows recovery | 100 MB Windows boot manager | 45 GB Windows 7 | 190 GB NTFS

And what I'd like them to be:
15 GB Windows recovery | 100 MB Windows boot manager | 45 GB Windows 7 | 173 GB NTFS | 10 GB UNR / | 5 GB UNR /home | 2 GB UNR Swap

[snowpine]

This is just a guess, but I think the problem could be the four-primary-partition limit. If this is the case, you will need to delete one of the primary partitions and create an extended partition. Once this is done, you can create many logical partitions within the extended partition.

This explains it much better than I can: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_partitioning

[t0mppa]

Thanks for the tip, sounds plausible. I was already wondering why they set up all the partitions as primary ones, since I never did that myself except for the ones that require to be booted from and thus never ran into the limit of only 4 primaries per HDD.

I was positively surprised when one of the manufacturers software tools allowed me to originally choose the sizes of the two NTFS partitions instead of them being lumped together into one big NTFS partition with Windows system files all over, so that no free software can handle shrinking it, like was done on my last laptop, but I guess it was a little early to be happy, since now I'll have to kill the other one anyway.

The UNR installer has no options towards primary/extended partitions though, unlike the other Ubuntu installers I've used, so I guess I'll have to download some external software to handle it after all. Quite annoying that people don't think things through and give proper tools for OS installs.

[t0mppa]

I see, on further research into the matter, the limit is not of four primary partitions, but four partitions in total. That means 3 primaries + 1 extended at best.

And thus the installer started offering a lot more options once I killed one of the original four primary partitions and turned it into an extended one.