[ubuntu-uk] Installing Ubuntu to dual-boot (partition sizes)

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Aug 31, 2007 at 06:25:13PM +0100, Mark Harrison wrote:
> I've only ever installed Ubuntu as the only O/S on PCs before, but I do 
> need the laptop to be able to run Windows Media Centre from time to 
> time, so dual-boot is the way to go.
> 
> I have an 80Gb HDD, with 40+Gb free at the moment... so in principle 
> could re-partition down, to give, say, 20Gb to Ubuntu, and leave 20 
> still free for Windows.
> 
> Some of the files are at the "wrong end" of the disk, though, so I don't 
> have a big block of contiguous space free.

The Feisty installer should be able to do this resize job regardless of
contiguity: ntfsresize is clever enough to be able to relocate data as
necessary.

(Obviously make backups of anything valuable first, as you would for any
major invasive exercise like installing an OS.)

> Oh - and in an ideal world, I'd like to set things up so the local email 
> store (Thunderbird) was on some kind of drive that could be read/written 
> reliably by EITHER O/S .... is this viable, or am I going to need to 
> keep two copies of my "Offline IMAP" ?

A FAT32 partition should be fine for now. In the future (Ubuntu 7.10 and
on) we should be able to support writing to NTFS as well.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]