[members at lugog] dualboot partion problem

[Ian Dickinson]

On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 4:32 PM, Douglas Phillips
<douglas at douglasthepotter.f2s.com> wrote:
> I have already tried this but as there are already 4 partitions
4? What do they hold? I would have expected one for your C: drive and
one for the system recovery partition .. I wonder what the others are?

> 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.
Not quite sure what you mean by free space, then. I was referring to
unallocated space: when I went through this process, I shrank the ntfs
partition to give me some unallocated space, which I then formatted as
ext3 during the Ubuntu install.

>> 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?
I'm no expert, but when I've done this in the past it "just worked":
the installer figured out which disk had the Master Boot Record and
put the grub loader there. The only time I had problems was when I
updated Vista to Win7 *after* installing Ubuntu: it trashed grub and
took a bit of fiddling** to get Linux back. Conventional wisdom has it
that doing Windows install first and Linux second usually isn't too
much of a problem.

Ian

** more so than usual because my disk is a soft-raid0 pair