installation question

[Tony Pursell]

On Fri, 2010-09-03 at 12:37 -0400, J wrote:
> 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 :)
> 

Thanks for that - I know the basics but not the details.

Tony