Ubuntu Express: Can it setup a partition and dual-boot with Windows

Michael Davies michael at msdavies.net
Tue Jun 13 04:03:37 BST 2006


On 6/13/06, David Whyte <david.whyte at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/7/06, Karl Goetz <kamping_kaiser at internode.on.net> wrote:
> > David Whyte wrote:
> > >
> > > The question is, does the Ubuntu 6.06 LTS live cd include some kind of
> > > tool to create new paritions and the like so that everything is done
> > > for me?  I don't have any tools to do this for me (i.e. partition
> > > magic) so I wouldn't know where to start.
> >
> > I think both cds do [1].
> > >
> >
> > [1] there was a bug where the live cd ate peoples ntfs partitions, but
> > I'm fairly sure that got sorted out ;)
> >
>
> I can see from a great wiki article
> (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GraphicalInstall) that you are able to shrink
> an existing partition, which is great, however, after asking around, I
> got told by a linux savvy mate that if my original partition is NTFS
> it is impossible to do any kind of resizing.
>
> Excuse my stupidity, but is this really the case?  Karl even mentioned
> an old problem with NTFS partitions, but chances are that is fixed in
> the released version of Dapper.
>
> Any feedback from the list?

I installed Dapper on a Dell workstation a week ago.  The PC was brand
new with one big NTFS partition, so all of the NTFS data was at the
front of the disk (if that wasn't the case I'd defragment to make sure
the data was at the front of the disk).  I then used Dapper to resize
the NTFS partition, and install in the free space left.

No problems at all.  Windows cracks a hissy-spit ("dirty filesystem!")
on next boot when it sees that the partition has been resized, but it
recovers nicely with no data loss.

Of course it's safest to perform a backup first of the existing data.
Do that if you are concerned about data loss.

HTH,

Michael...
-- 
Michael Davies               "Do what you think is interesting, do
mailto:michael at msdavies.net   something that you think is fun and
http://michaeldavies.org      worthwhile, because otherwise you won't
                              do it well anyway." -- Brian Kernighan



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