when to resize partitions

[Derek Broughton]

Ashley Benton wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 6:35 PM, Stephen Constantinou
> <stephanos at writeme.com
>> wrote:

>> After choosing to be guided over partition 8 I was offered a slide bar
>> that seemed to change partition 8 from the initial setting of
>>
>> sda8, 13.4GB 50% AND kubuntu 8.10, 13.4GB, 50%
>>
>> I could move the bar left to increase the kubuntu partition/section but
>> only reduce sda8 to 4.1GB 15% and kubuntu to 85%.

I'm not _certain_ what that's doing - I only saw it for the first time this
week - but I think it's trying to preserve the original data by shrinking
the partition, so...

>> As I progressed I got to a stage where it confirmed I was about to create
>> partition 11 of SCSi1 (0,0,0) (sda) as ext3 and
>> partition 12 of SCSi1 (0,0,0) (sda) as swop
...
>> Am I really creating more partitions 

Absolutely - it is keeping all your old partitions and creating the minimum
two that it needs for Ubuntu.

>> and how do I simply use the 
>> existing partitions for kubuntu.  

Manual partitioning - at least to delete the old Mandriva partition, then
you can back up and tell it to use the free space.  

>> Perhaps this was not a problem but I 
>> cannot see how creating more partitions is what I want to do and why can
>> I not use the whole of partition 8 for kubuntu?

You certainly can, but as long as you tell it to use the "guided" method,
it's going to try not to damage anything else you have.

> I would use gparted to delete the partition (mandriva) and create an empty
> partition, then install kubuntu on the new created partition

That's pretty much overkill when he's already _in_ a partitioning tool
(based on parted, iirc).
-- 
derek