when to resize partitions
Ray Parrish
crp at cmc.net
Sat Feb 28 13:53:59 UTC 2009
Ashley Benton wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 6:35 PM, Stephen Constantinou
> <stephanos at writeme.com <mailto:stephanos at writeme.com>> wrote:
>
> Dear All
>
> I have a PC with a 160 GB HDD. It is partitioned as follows
>
> SIZE USED
> sda1 fat16 41MB 33MB
> sda2 ntfs 78279MB 56634MB
> sda4 fat32 3380MB 2366MB
>
> sda5 ext3 4186MB 604MB
> sda6 swop 4186MB 0MB
> sda7 ext3 8381MB 3316MB
> sda8 ext3 28697MB 1216MB
> sda9 ext3 28648MB 6842MB
> sda10 ext3 4194MB 100MB
>
>
> It boots XP and Mandriva. My intention was to install Kubunto 8.10 to
> replace Mandriva. I thought I knew what I was doing until I got the
> Prepare Diskspace section of the installer.
>
> 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 chose this 15/85 ratio not fully understanding what I was doing
> but at
> least believing I was not altering the windows installation.
>
> 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
>
> Now I am confused.
>
> Am I really creating more partitions and how do I simply use the
> existing partitions for kubuntu. 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?
>
> I abandoned it and am posting this question to be cautious.
>
> Any guidance and help appreciated.
>
Hello,
It's possible to skip the partitioning step altogether. You already have
a 4 GB swap partition that you can use, and need only empty the current
Mandriva partition, and install to it. I see it currently has a little
over a GB used in that partition. If it's just the Mandriva operating
system, and no data that you care to keep, simply select that partition
to install to, and then select the "manual" option when the partition
manager comes up.
This will allow you to skip the partitioning step, and go right on to
installing Kubuntu into sda8, which will overwrite anything currently
there. If you want to make that partition a bit bigger, you could do
that as well, with the manual method. I used this method the last time I
installed Ubuntu, but I forgot to set up a swap partition, so I had to
create a swap file once in Ubuntu, and mount it at /mnt/ which works
just as well as using a dedicated partition.
Since you already have a huge 4 GB swap partition set up, you don't need
another one. I read an article the other day that told how to share a
swap partition between Linux and Windows, so if you;re interested in
that, I'll dig through my browser history, and post the url here.
If for some reason the manual partitioning option will still not allow
you to increase the size of sda8, then I would take the advice of the
other person who answered previously, and use a Gparted Live CD to do it
before the install. If you do that don't make the mistake I made while
using Gparted Live. While I was using it to resize my Windows and Ubuntu
partitions to take back some of the space Ubuntu grabbed during the
guided install [I didn't notice the slider adjustment, so it got more
than I wanted to give it] I got bored, and began fiddling with things in
the Gparted interface while it was resizing things.
I found a setting to hide some component of the Gparted Live desktop,
and made the mistake of attempting to set it to hidden. Since it's a CD,
and read only, it's attempt to comply and record the setting didn't go
well. The hard drive light quit flashing, indicating that the
repartitioning had stopped, the computer became unresponsive, and I
eventually had to give up and hard power down.
I got lucky, as the only thing I had to do to fix the damage from the
interrupted partitioning process, was re-installing Ubuntu. If it had
gotten much farther along in the process, I'm sure I would have lost
Windows as well. So... it's best to leave Gparted Live alone while it
runs. 8-)
Later, Ray Parrish
--
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http://www.rayslinks.com
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http://www.writingsoftheschizophrenic.com/
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