a little instal advice please

[imsoslow]

Hello everyone , im hoping to learn a little something today about instal.
First ....


Equipment
Dell desk top
Win XP SP2


C drive = 80 Gb running Win Xp ok


E drive = partition 1 of 2 is 58 GB ,, free space


F drive = partition 2 of 2 is 53 GB of files to keep


OK .. I want too instal Lubuntu in the E drive, but keep windows XP as i need it from time to time.
Im having a lot of problems with failed instals , i may need som advice .
I have Lubuntu on a 14Gb flash drive along with a program called UNETBOOTIN , which allows me to run from the flashdrive.
what would be my best options .
Please use small words as i dont understand Linux , and im fairly thick as a person anyway.
maybe i cant do this or im confused.
Thank you

[oldfred]

Windows confuses drives & partitions. You probably only have one physical hard drive and a flash drive.
But have multiple partitions on the hard drive.
With Windows a d: "drive" may be a second partition on first physical drive or first partition on second physical drive.
With Linux drives are clearly shown as sda, sdb, sdc etc and partitions are the numbers after the drive like sda1, sda2, sda3.

You do not mention a d: drive, so best to see exact partitioning from Ubuntu.
Open a terminal in the live installer and copy & paste this into terminal. Copy & paste output back to forum. If more than a very few lines use Forum's advanced editor (Go Advanced) and highlight the output and click on the # to add code tags to preserve formatting & make it easier to read.

sudo parted -l

copy & paste command as -l is an el, not I nor 1, many try to type and use wrong char. Depends on font used how much it looks like lower case L.

[imsoslow]

Dear Mr OldFred
Hi ,, thanks for the reply ,
first thing is, the drive info I put up is correct . there are 2 drives, one with a partition , i know this because i put it in myself some years ago
However , thank for the linux drive labelling , I did see those type of names come up, but wasnt sure what they meant .
So i may have something like
sda then sdb1 and sdb2 for example ?
Ah the D drive , i did not put that in as that is the DVD writer (DVD-RAM driveD)
there is another drive i missed out as i thought it was not important,, A (3 1/2 Floppy)


I did try to do an instal from the flash drive , and it seemed to go well , then i got an error and it could not continue, damn , after that andi had to abort , i went back to windows and found that I could no longer see that drive ,, so 58 GB of space are missing !
i was thinking of taking the info out of the F; part onto a portable drive and then just reformatting or putting the whole drive back into one .
so E; and F: would just be one big drive of NTFS and maybe putting Lubuntu into that, in that way if anything went wrong I would not loose any of the files in F:
they could be reuploaded later on .


The idea is to make a dual boot computer, still running good ole , WIN XP ..
but I can boot into Lubuntu if I want ,, maybe in a year or so , just loose the windows part but for the moment ..DUAL
im back on the WIN XP now to write this


what would be my next move? it seems every time i do something i make it worse for myself.


PS .. after the instal atempt i notice now using a partition tool in windows , that i may not see part of the drive as it has became ExFAt .. the instal reformatted that !!damn .. i havnt re booted to see if Lubuntu can see it yet .
also each drive has a small 10 Mb unallocated bit , that windows must use for something ...
What a mess ive made

[oldfred]

Need to see partitions.Then may be able to make specific suggestions, not generalized ones that you may not understand.

I would not expect Lubuntu to change anything to exFAT. The exFAT driver has to be added for it to even know about that. Your third party Windows tools may have done that?
XP needs to be NTFS as I remember, but have not used XP for 10 years.

I dual booted from 2006 to 2010 with XP & Ubuntu on my Dual Core Intel based system.
The one XP app that I kept after install of Ubuntu I really liked. But the Linux app was functional, just not quite as good. But not worth all the hassle of weekly booting into XP to run app and needing hours of updates.

But you really should not run XP unless not even connected to Internet. You will get hacked.

[imsoslow]

oops

OK , I also do not know why the exFAt came about but win does not see it , however a tol called ... mini tool partition wizards finds it ok and tells me theres 145 Gb of exFAt now ... i dunno why but thats annoying the lubuntu instal was from the lubuntu program itself , i can click on ,,instal lubuntu from the (lubuntu ) desktop


as to not running XP , i do need it for now and my wife is used to some things on here , so for the moment i can use it .
dont worry about me getting hacked
i still need to get lubuntu installed , but now i need to fromat the whole spare drive back into one , make it all NTFS.
I suppose that is first ...
when thats done try again to instal without it turning to exFAt

[imsoslow]

well ok,, i got my partition back
i now have ,,, all on the same spare drive
E; NTFS 58 Gb empty
F; NTFS 53 GB 18% used
K : 8 MB NTFS ,, a small partition left over from a previous installation of windows




So now, I would like to get Lubuntu installed from the flashdrive into drive E; NTFS 58 Gb empty


is this possible? and on computer boot up i will then have a choice ( as i do when i put the flash drive in.. Lubuntu or Windows..
next move?

[oldfred]

E: is Windows, it will not show as E:, so you have to know what it will look like in the installer.

Post the parted output to see partitions.

[Impavidus]

i was thinking of taking the info out of the F; part onto a portable drive and then just reformatting or putting the whole drive back into one .
so E; and F: would just be one big drive of NTFS and maybe putting Lubuntu into that, in that way if anything went wrong I would not loose any of the files in F:
they could be reuploaded later on .

Copying everything to a portable drive would be a very good idea. Although it's possible to install Lubuntu on that harddrive without loosing the files on the F partition, it's not unlikely you'll make a mistake and loose the entire F partition instead. And even if you don't make a mistake, you could loose the files if the harddrive breaks. So, yes, make sure you've got those backups.

[imsoslow]

drive.JPGold fred

errm , no
C is windows , as in my first post thus
C drive = 80 Gb running Win Xp ok


E drive = partition 1 of 2 is 58 GB ,, free space


F drive = partition 2 of 2 is 53 GB of files to keep

so E is free space and shows as E
so what im trying to do is instal Lubutu on E , and leave everything else as is .
then i get to choose on bootup , Win or Lubutu

[imsoslow]

Lmpavidus.........

yes , that is done . all saved and copied

so im just having a problem with the instal of Lubutu on E drive
I cant seem to intal it either from the flash drive or.. from the program itself , when its running , even though i have that option it failed, and everything went south then , so im trying to work out why , before i try again ,
hence the instal advice post ..
thats it

Sorry forgot to mention its Lubuntu 18.04 that i have , in case that is important info as well