On Wed, Sep 07, 2011 at 02:41:28PM +0100, Brett Parker wrote:
On 07 Sep 13:16, Richard Parsons wrote:
Hi, I've recently bought a Compaq laptop. It currently has Windows 7 installed and I want to dual boot with Ubuntu.
Unfortunately, Compaq have already partitioned the hard disk into four partitions. The largest partition, which is 480GB is the second. If I begin the installer, and resize the second partition to create free space, then I'm told that it is "unuseable". I believe that the extra partitions are for recovery etc.
So what can I do? Is there a way of getting Ubuntu installed without disturbing the contents of the partitions already setup?
You're basically screwed - you can only have 4 primary partitions, usually when wanting to go over this you make on of those 4 an extended partition and new partitions get created in that.
I'd take a diskimage of the disk in current state, using something like clonezilla, then rejig the disk to remove any partitions that you don't need, (you'll probably want a couple of partitions for linux), and go from there.
The reason for using something like clonezilla to take an image first should be reasonably obvious, means that if you need to get back to that state you can :)
Thanks Brett for your thoughts. Having looked at Clonezilla it looks like I'll need a disk to backup to as large as the one I am cloning. So it sounds to me as if I'm going to need a 500GB external drive.
Thanks again all for your help.
Richard