Install problem

[Derek Broughton]

miner wrote:

> Success. Thanks Bill you were on the right track. I had 2 active
> partitions and an extended one with 2 logical ones inside. Following your
> note, I formatted the second active partition and then did not have any
> problems installing Ubuntu.
> 
> A small hitch though as for some reason I was not given an option to
> select a swap partition but I went ahead with the install.

I imagine that was because you didn't have anywhere to put a swap partition,
if all the space was already allocated.  If you're not actually using the
last two partitions, you can use one of those. or repartition that 3rd
primary partition with any of the Ubuntu partition tools (*fdisk or
*parted).  Once you have the partition you want, you use "mkswap" to turn
it into a swap partition, and add a line like:
  /dev/sda3  none  swap  sw   0  0
to /etc/fstab (if sda3 is the correct partition) to make it mount it at boot
time.

> Everything 
> works well, Windows included although it does not label the Ubuntu
> partition calling it "healthy unknown partition". This is probably normal
> in this situation and besides I know what it is.

It's normal, but if you want Windows to never even notice it, you can add:

  hide (hd0,1) 

to the boot stanza for windows in /boot/grub/menu.lst

-- 
derek