installation question

[J]

On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 10:45, Tony Pursell <ajp at princeswalk.fsnet.co.uk> wrote:

> Looks like HP is using all four avaialable partitions for Win 7.  Was
> Win 7 pre-installed.  Did you create any new partitions in Win7?  You
> need a free partition that Ubuntu can use as an extended partition to
> put all its file systems in. That is why you don't have the option to
> dual boot.

This is my thought as well... but let me expound just a bit, because I
have found that this is something that not my students never seem to
understand (I still don't completely, either)...

When partitioning a hard disk, you can have up to 15 partitions,
HOWEVER you can have only 4 PRIMARY partitions. To get those extra
partitions, you need an extended partition that contains several
logical partitions within it... So, using things to the maximum, your
hard disk arrangement would look something like this:

Drive
    \ Primary Partiton 1
    \ Primary Partition 2
    \ Primary Partition 3
    \ Extended Partition
        \ Logical Partition 1
        \ Logical Partiton 2
        \ ...
        \ Logical Partition 11 (it may be 12)

Since you seem to indicate you have the following:

Drive
    \ Primary 1
    \ Primary 2
    \ Primary 3
    \ Primary 4

You may be stuck...

As this is a laptop, adding another drive is not a reasonable possibility...

One solution could be to remove one of those partitions, at which
point the installer would allow you to resize the rest and do the side
by side install.
But you need to BE SURE of what is contained in those partitions...

>From what you've said so far, it appears you've got C: as the Windows
7 drive, D: is probably the restore partition, and E: contains a bunch
of HP tools.

Personally, I'd dump the HP Tools partition, but that's just me.

But not being familiar with how HP sets up their restore stuff... I
dunno... at the very least, your only options at this point are A:
remove one of those partitions, which frees up partition entries to
allow for an extended and logical setup as shown above, or B: use Wubi
and install inside windows itself... thought there's a bit of pain
there of a different sort :)