Question on partitioning HDD

To all the linux gurus,
I recently dual booted vista with XP, and i would like to either triple or quad boot now. I have a Ubuntu disc coming in the mail (or I will download it if I am that anxious).

My partition for the dual boot went ~80GB to Vista and 60GB to XP (or something along those lines (my Hard Drive is 160GB total). Anyways, I would like to partition the Hard drive even more, leaving XP to have the largest disk space and vista to have a minimum. I partitioned my dual boot in Vista's own Partitioning software, and know it says i cannot partition anymore. Is it time for me to turn to another partitioning program, or does vista really need that much space? What I would really like to do is give XP another 20GB (since that will be my main OS) and then partition out 2 more drives for another 2 OS's.

Thanks for reading and any insight would be greatly appreciated!

By the way, any sony SZ owners on here booting with Ubuntu?

 

you can always download ubuntu, as you know, burn to disk and use it to partition the drives w/ gpart

vista's pm likes vista, of course and vista likes C: reduce it to 50 or 40gb esp if it's not going to be your main OS. I usually make it about 40g in a multi-boot setup. There should be no problem increasing xp to 80.

You say you want to set it up for 2 more OS's..... be careful, it can get tricky. BACKUP your data!!!! Messing w/ partitions can sometimes be fatal

 

When Ubuntu comes (i suggest you just download it though) it has GParted with it, just use that for your partitioning. I suggest you look at how much Vista is using now, and reduce it to have only about 10GB-20GB more than it's using and see how much you're using with XP and only give it about 40GB more than you're using and give the rest to Ubuntu's partitions. It would help if you took a screen shot of your partition layout though (it would be best if you downloaded Ubuntu and went into the LiveCD to take a screen shot so that i can identify it easier), but showing me the Vista partitioning tool should be fine too.

 

I second that. Partitioning with multiple operating systems can be tricky. The rule of thumb I use when partitioning is that all things must be done through Vista first because that OS is the most finicky about partitioning hard disks. Vista makes your hard drive a "dynamic drive" which means that manipulating dynamic partitions with any OS other than Vista can mean that you can corrupt all of your partitions in such a way that nothing works and everthing has to be re-installed. Take my word for it: I did that a couple times when I was triple-booting Win XP, Vista Ultimate, and Ubuntu on my Inspiron 6000 and had this happen a couple times when I really needed the computer to work.

Here's what you do to keep it safe: shrink and extend partitions using Vista partitioners to make space for Ubuntu and Win XP. You can reduce the amount of size you can shrink the Vista parition by deleting old shadow copies, back-ups, temporary files, etc. Then install Ubuntu on the empty space on your hard drive. You will probably want 10-20 GB total for Ubuntu if you are going to use it for lots of programs. Then, make the following partitions manually during the install:

• 256-1000 MB Swap (less if you have more ram... I had 2 GB and barely used swap at that point)
• 1-5 GB /home (this keeps your settings and files intact if you reinstall or upgrade linux)
• 10+ GB / (this will hold your program files, drivers, operating system files, etc)

A final thought on partitioning for this purpose: do it manually during the install because you run the risk of the installer reigning terror on your other partitions if it is done guided. You could avoid the partitioning by using Wubi on Windows XP which installs Ubuntu using part of the Win XP partition. Don't do this on the Vista partition if you can avoid it because Wubi has been known to cause problems with the pagefile system in Vista.

 

All right, I will get on that as soon as i get my backlight issue figured out in XP.

 

What a bunch of great advice... I'm going to be treading through this very slowly...

 

I just took a look at Wubi and it seems to be an easier way to work around. I might go with Wubi, but on the other hand I would like to have it installed on its own partition.

Btw, I just found out that Swap is like virtual memory/ram right?

 

Since XP will be your primary OS, you'll want it as fast as possible. Try to keep it near the front of the disk (to the left) and try keeping all your files in a separate partition so you can make the XP partition as small as possible with about 1-3GBmore than needed as the smaller the partition is the faster it will be. Yes, Wubi can be an option but it's slower than a real Ubuntu install so if you're looking for real speed (and trust me you'll get speed) then use a real install. Correct, swap is like the pagefile in Windows.

 

There is the setup of my partitions. Hopefully you guys can help me out and get this thing organized in the right direction.

 

I would stay there in Vista disk management and expand the size of the C: partition to swallow up that 1.46 gb. Then I would shrink the XP partition by the amount you want to give to Ubuntu.

 

You have plenty of space. Vista is only using 13.19GB, you can shrink it to fit your needs. I recommend you shrink it down to about 30GB which leaves 46.57GB so use that for Ubuntu because you're not using much of XP's space and you might find that you like Ubuntu more than Windows entirely.

 

downloading ubuntu right now. Hopefully you guys can guide me through or give me some help. I will look at the ubuntu forums also.

 

I'll help you out as much as i can, i shouldn't be too busy today.

 

Is this dynamic drive thing in Vista like LVM in Linux? I'm still with using XP for gaming purposes so I have no clue about what Vista does.

 

Hey Calvin,
I would have liked to install Ubuntu yesterday but didn't get a chance. I was working around in XP and also finishing up a homemade DDR dance pad for my brother (it took a year but it works now, thanks to a new sensor we tried).

I was looking around today and found "Ultimate Edition" of Ubuntu. Can anyone tell me about this/recommend it? I already have a copy of Ubuntu 8.04 on a CD from yesterday.

By the way, should I follow a how to tutorial on how to install & partition for ubuntu? If so, which tutorial would be the best to follow. Or should I just ask the linux gurus on this board

Edit:
Also, when I used the Live CD of Ubuntu, I found that there were files on that small partition (the 1.4GB one) It had some sony stuff in it and i think a boot file and MBR if I remember correctly.

Should I go in and defrag every partition (the windows and vista one)? Would the general defrag provided in windows be sufficient?

 

Ubuntu Ultimate Edition is weak sauce, don't use it. It's just Ubuntu with a different theme (that you can easily download and apply in Ubuntu itself). Use the Ubuntu cd you got yesterday. This guide by Tom is good, if you need any help beyond what the guide covers then i'll help you out.

 

well i decided to defrag both partitions in windows xp with Auslogics Defrag found in your best free windows software link.... I decided to boot into vista to see if everything was all right before installing ubuntu, and as it turns out when i sleleceted vista, it gave me a cannot start error of some sort with the safe modes and boot into windows regualrly. It told me to put in my setup disc and run startup recovery. (Which i did and it could not fix) So now I cannot boot into vista but my XP is perfectly fine (at least I think).

Help....


EDIT:
Disregard..... ( i dont know how this happend) But I rebooted and pressed F8 for vista to boot into last known good boot (something like that) and it worked. So i decided to boot into vista regularly... and It works (I'm typing from vista rgiht now)

Sleeping time... :SLEEP:

 

If you need any help, or just want assurance, IM(preferably by MSN) me or Calvin, we 'll be glad to help you out.

 

And you have my axe!

 

I just made my swap partition and now it says i have 54GB of space that is unusable....

 

Then just reformat your swap.

 

What do you mean reformat swap?
I tried making a ext3 first and then i still have unusalbe disk space.

BTw when I took a chunk out of vista i left it as free space.


No probelms, I went back into vista and retook that portion i made and had vista regain it again, so tomorrow i will try this again. It should be straight forward right?

click manual
take 50 some GB away from vista
then make 1gb swap
then make 25gb ext 3 with / mount
left over space will be used for something else (either xp or...)

Right process?

 

Yeah, that seems pretty right. If you have any more doubts just post them.

 

Which software says that?

How is it phrased precisely?

 

I went back into ubuntu to try to install it.
got to the partition part.
1000mb for swap (from vista partition)
Then error popped up something with failed and abort
After that it automatically changed my vista partition to a swap (the whole 90GB of it)
Talked to Thomas via IM to see what my problem was. (Cool person by the way and a genius for his age!

Put in my vista disk, and vista couldnt find the vista drive.
Went into ubuntu to change swap partition back into ntfs.
rebooted and partition said that bootmgr is missing (press ctrl+alt+delete)

So is there a chance of getting vista back? It still shows the 22gb of space used up (when I had vista)
my xp drive is still showing in the live cd, but i cant boot to it since vista was the boot manager.

 

I'm not quite understanding this. This doesn't sound right. I know you did something wrong somewhere but i'm having a seriously hard time trying to figure out where. Do you think you can explain in as great detail as you can from start to now what you did?

 

I'll try to explain it in more detail, but I dont know if I can.

I got to the partition part of the installation of Ubuntu and I went into the vista partition to edit it. I selected 1000mb and chose that as my swap.

The warning came up saying this change is permanent with the go back or continue button. I continued on.

Then before the formating or whatever could finish, an error came up saying that the partition failed and that it would need to abort. SO the only choice was to accept it. Then my vista partition automatically became a 90GB partition worth of SWAP. (i dont know how this happened.)

I tried to undo it (with the button on the left hand side) but that was no use. SO i decided to exit out of installer. Went to reboot my computer and it said (No operating system or missing operatign system)
So I put in the vista disk to try to repair the thing, but the partition for vista does not show up when i get to this

So i went back into ubuntu to look for my drives. Didnt find it in the my computer so i opened up gparted. I switched the swap partiton back into NTFS, since I thought that would help somehow. It still showed the disk space used (about 22gb which I believe was the vista files etc.)

Now since its in NTFS, I rebooted and the error this time says that a bootmgr is missing.


So my question is.... is there a chance of getting vista back? Without having to reinstall vista from the dvd disks?
my xp drive is still showing in the live cd of ubuntu, but i cant boot to it since vista was the boot manager.

I dont know if this clears it up a bit....

 

Time to reinstall Vista, XP, and everything.

 

It sounds pretty clear to me that you messed up when setting up your swap. You most likely set wrong numbers or something there. I don't think you can get back Vista or XP at all. You'll have to wipe your entire machine clean and reinstall everything.

 

He may still be able to get XP back, he just needs to fix the mbr.
Boot up your XP CD, and go into the recovery mode.
Select your installation of XP,
Type "fixmbr"
Exit, and try and see if that works.

 

going to check the xp drive and see if it works later.

Thomas was right

 

What do I say? For starters:
I told you so!

 

What I'm reading here is that you took your Vista partition and told the partitioner to resize it and make it a swap partition for Linux. That's a pretty good way to lose Vista. I have no clue why the operation failed.

What's the partition that shows up? The XP partition? A Vista partition which contains only data? What is it?

Judging by what you wrote, I would say your chances of recovering Vista are slim. XP was recoverable because it was on a different partition which presumably was not touched during the installation of Ubuntu. In that case, fixing the MBR is enough. But if you tell the installer to use your Vista partition as a swap, guess what, you're telling the installer to scrap the data that was on there.

Chances are slim but not null. If you want to attempt to restore that partition the first thing to do is to put it back to the exact size it was and then check the file system integrity. If that passes you should be fine. But that's only if the installer did not have even a chance to start messing with the data on that partition. If it did indeed start formatting it, you should salvage what you can (if anything) and reinstall Vista.

BTW, can the Ubuntu installer ever resize a Vista partition while preserving the data? Last time I checked, it could not but then again my habits have been formed in the days when Ubuntu did not exist and the available distributions had very little partition resizing capabilities. So it is possible that it can and I just don't know about it.

 

So is there any other way of getting xp to boot?
I tired fdisk /mbr, fixboot, fixmgr.

 

i'm jumping in here a little late after letting the damage be done

do you have the xp install disk? if so, did you try a repair w/ it to see if it could find the xp partition?? If not, well, let me think......

 

well i got it to install.
I installed vista and only gave it 30gb and the rest was put aside. Then I went to install XP. Went back to vista and partitioned about 21gb for ubuntu. From this I was able to install ubuntu easily!

By the way, I used easybcd to boot up... If anyone wants to use it here is the link.
http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Ubuntu

Thanks everyone!
(Now back to Xp to add my drivers and stuff and then into ubuntu!!! )

Edit:
Spoke too soon. XP is missing hal.dll. Time for a reinstall says Thomas

 

Ya, happened to me once.
I have no idea why.

 

Could the old information on these pages be of help?
It describes a 'Hal.dll missing error' caused by a misreading of partitions when installing multiple OS's. link and link

 

forgot to tupdate

I repaired using the XP disk following some guide from about.com i believe.
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/fixtheproblem/ht/repairbootini.htm
That to be exact.

Then I just deleted the double XP (since it made 2 parts to boot into, one that worked the other didnt)

All is well for now.......