Re: [orca-list] The Partitioner In The Latest Version of Ubuntu

["Earle" <e zwicker sympatico ca>]

I want to thank Daniel and Jeffrey for giving me all the info about partitioning.  I do have a couple of 
other questions 
that I hope someone can anser for me.

Daniel said that I could boot from the live CD, and bring up gparted to partition my drives.  How would I go 
about 
accomplishing this?  I know how to boot the live CD, and to bring ubuntu up with orca,, but how do I get into 
gparted? 
I tried going to the system menu, then to administration tools, and choosing the partitioner, but when I do 
that, I end 
up losing speech.  What am I doing wrong?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

Earle

msn:  peterson_33 sympatico ca

skype and twitter:  rowdyamerican
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Daniel Dalton" <d dalton iinet net au>
To: "EARL ZWICKER" <e zwicker sympatico ca>
Cc: <jawswizard ec rr com>; "orca list" <orca-list gnome org>
Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2008 5:37 AM
Subject: Re: [orca-list] The Partitioner In The Latest Version of Ubuntu


On Tue, 20 May 2008, EARL ZWICKER wrote:

> instructions would be greatly appreciated.  I see check boxes by each drive,
> and I think I also see check boxes by each partition, but I'm not exactly
> sure, so more help would be great.  How can I actually size the partitions,

Well, a drive contains partitions eg. sda, sdb.
You could have sda1 sda2 sdb1 sdb2 etc.
So first, you want to work out where linux should go, do you just have one
internal hard drive?
if so linux will go on sda.
Are you dual booting?
If so then linux should also go on a partition after the first os.
If you aren't dual booting linux will probably go to sda1.

Here is what I do:
1. Fire up the livecd and use gparted to resize my partition, (usually
windows sadly).
2. Once resized and my changes are applied, I reboot into the installer in
the usual way.
3. Since I have resized and now there is continuous free space after the
win partition, I tell the installer to creat its partitions on that free
space.
The option is called 'install to largest continuous free space' or
something like that.
2 partitions will be created, maybe 3 actually:
linux: your whole linux installation
swap: when linux runs out of ram
extended: so you can have more than 4 partitions, swap is in the extended
partition.
Its a little more complicated than that actually, for more details, try a
google search.

If you are like me and want different partitions for different things like
/home so it is easy to do reinstalls and stuff, and share between the
distros I am dual booting, you can do that, but please do a bit of
research.

> and how can I make sure not to lose the partition that already has data on
> it?

Well, back it up? Make sure you do that, because there are no garantees.
But once backed up, just be sure to read everything the installer says,
including the final over view before writing to disk, and basically, don't
delete or format your existing partitions: if your data exists on sda1 and
the over view says sda2 and sda4 and sda5 will be formatted then that is
fine.
If it says sda1 will be deleted or formatted then go back and make sure
you fix it.
(Of course if sda1 contains your data)

-- 
Daniel Dalton

http://members.iinet.net.au/~ddalton/
<d dalton iinet net au>