[members at lugog] dualboot partion problem

[Douglas Phillips]

Ian Dickinson wrote:
> 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.
>   
I have already tried this but as there are already 4 partitions I cannot 
create any more and if I try to delete one, it just become unallocated 
space, which is not at all the same thing as 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!
>   
Adding another HD is no problem but I do not understand where grub 
resided or functions with a dual drive dual boot set up?

Thanks,
Douglas
> 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
>>     
>
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