[members at lugog] dualboot partion problem

[Ian Dickinson]

Hi Douglas,
There's a version of gparted which you can boot into from a CD. What I
would do is to boot the machine with gparted, re-partition the current
disk to shrink the size of the NTFS partition, then install Ubuntu
into the free space.

An alternative, if you're feeling slightly more adventurous, is to get
a second hard drive (ask around, or check e-bay ... it needn't cost
you much) then use that new drive as your linux drive and the current
disk as your windows drive. But that does mean installing a second
harddrive, which isn't usually too difficult but might be daunting for
the less experienced!

Hth,
Ian


On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 2:18 PM, Douglas Phillips
<douglas at douglasthepotter.f2s.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> While recuperating I thought I would replace my aging computer with a
> Medion from Aldi. As it comes with WinDoz7 and I have a pyrometer
> program which only runs on windoz, I thought I would dual boot with
> Ubuntu. When it comes to the installer, it say there several operating
> systems on it on the hard drive but see it all as /dev/sda2 and dose not
> give one the choice a dual in stall. the choice is, Use the entire disk
> or manually, which shows prepared partitions;
>
> /dev/sda1   ntfs       104 MB          (35MB used)
> /dev/sada2 ntfs 975593 MB    (21804 MB used)
> unusable              1954  MB
> /dev/sda3    ntfs  21474 MB    (10139 MB used)
> /dev/sda4    ntfs    1074 MB        (358 MB used)
>
> At this point I am not sure how to proceed.
>
> I could just make it a pure Linux machine and consine WinDoz7 to the
> dust bin and continue to run my piro on a separate XP machine (which I
> really would like to throw away) or struggle on with vertualbox, which
> runs the program ok but is very ify when it comes to com ports for
> connecting the pyrometer to the computer.
>
> I presume that as the Medion computer only comes with a restore disc,
> one cannot use this to install WinDoz7 on vertualbox? Is this more
> evidace of Msoft being a dog-in-the-mange, stopping gpart from seeing it
> on the HD?
>
> Any words of wisdom anyone?
>
> best wishes,
> Douglas