replacing Windows

[Matthew Flaschen]

Jared Greenwald wrote:
> Someone gave me one of their old computers.  The thing still has some
> data on it.  I've made a backup of the data to my raid, but in case
> they remember about some obscure file they saved somewhere, I wanted
> to try to save the Windows area as an accessible partition on whatever
> new install I perform.

Use GParted (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php) to shrink the
Windows partition as well as to create two new partitions, an ext3
(holds the OS and data) and Linux swap partition (virtual memory).  Set
the swap size to twice the RAM, make the Windows (NTFS) as small as
possible, then allocate the rest of the space to ext3.  Then, when you
install Ubuntu be sure /not/ to reformat, and to use the existing ext3
and swap.

Matt Flaschen