I would like to install Chrome OS into a new partition on my main harddrive. I have many questions about this process. The answers I have found are way too technical for a newbie like myself so please be gentle on me.

1. Do I format the new partition using the Windows 7 partitioning tool? What type of a partition should it be?
2. Can I install Ch Os from a USB drive rather than a CD? i.e. How do I boot the installation USB drive?
3. I have a 1Tb main drive. How much of the should I set aside for Linux? I save very little data files on the main drive so have a lot of room.
4. Is there any other tools I need to get before starting the process? Things that might make this process easier?

Thanks

My experience has been that, without understanding the technical details of partitioning, doing anything more with partitioning, other than simply running an install program for a single OS, is dangerous. Further, understanding the technical details of partitioning is not at all hard. Could you please post here the answers that you found too technical so that someone can expand them into newbie terms for you.

I would recommend not. My experience with Windows partitioning tools is that they set up partitions for use by only Windows. Linux, including Chrome OS, requires completely different partitions. Could you please post a screenshot of your Windows 7 partitioning tool where it shows what partitions are currently present so that I can see what you currently have on your hard drive?

This completely depends on what kind of motherboard your computer has. Your computer's motherboard is that large circuit board in your computer that everything else plugs into. When you first turn your computer on, your computer receives instructions from a section of memory hard wired into the motherboard that is called the BIOS. It is the BIOS that determines whether you can boot from a USB drive and how you do it. To find out whether or not your BIOS allows USB drive booting, you need to access BIOS setup. How you access BIOS setup varies from one computer to the next but typically is done by pressing <F2>, <DEL> or <F10> when you first turn the computer on. What is the make and model of your computer?

I have personally found dual boot (or multi boot), a setup where you have a choice of more than one OS to boot but where you can only boot one OS at a time, to be messy. Further, it is awkward and clumsy if you need to share data between those OSes. Dual boot is what you are wanting to get into here. I much prefer installing only one robust OS (e.g. openSUSE 13.2) on my computer and then install each other OS in its own virtual machine under a virtual machine manager that in turn runs under the OS I installed on the computer itself. If you can, you might consider replacing your Windows 7 on your computer with openSUSE 13.2 (i.e. give the entire 1 TB hard drive over to openSUSE 13.2) and then use VMWare's VMPlayer 7.2 to set up your virtual machines (VMPlayer 7.2 is free to use). You can then again install Windows 7 into a virtual machine under VMPlayer 7.2 and also install your Chrome OS into another virtual machine under VMPlayer 7.2 (a process that would be much simpler than trying to install Chrome OS side by side with your Windows 7 as it is currently set up).

If you have windows 7 currently installed, it's partitions probably take up the entire drive. If that's the case, use the Disk Management tool in windows to shrink that partition to make room for Chrome. Reboot to test and it might be a good idea to run chkdsk from windows since you have changed a partition.


No, you can't because a default windows system is not capable of it, creating a Linux filesystem. You could create a partition and not format it but it would probably be simpler to leave the space as unallocated. If your hardware isn't too old, you should be able to enter the BIOS setup on boot and set the flash drive to first boot priority.

When I say I do not understand the technical things I have read, I am talking about Linux OS. I have used Windows Disk Management to partition hard drives before. I actually built the computer I am using so I am not that uninformed. The technical questions I have seen and do not understand has, I think, Linux code and such.

I currently have 5 hard drives. Drive 1 is an old system drive that no longer works. It does have my downloads (which are shared so I can access them) but that is all the data on it. It had a W7 64 and a W7 32 partition. I only want to install the W7 64.

As I said, I built this computer. I used an ASUS motherboard with an Intel i5-2500 CPU 3.30GHZ chip.

Thank you for the reminder to check my BIOS. I had never seen the option to boot from a USB drive but it is there.

Just to clarify a couple of things. openSUSE 13.2 is an OS itself? It allows for installation of more than one OS in virtual drives? Not sure I know what a virtual drive is (as opposed to a partition) but I assume VMPlayer 7.2 will walk me through that process?
I hate to have to install openSUSE because that will require reformating the existing drive and deleted ALL my programs! But if that is the best solution, that is what I will have to do.

That is indeed useful to know. So if I use openSUSE 13.2 it will ask me which drive I want to use and then format that drive?

I hope I am using the "quotes" correctly. It has been a long time since I built a forum

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If you are going to use Open Suse, when you boot the installation medium, you should get to a screen which shows the various drives and partitions on each. I don't know if you are familiar with Linux naming conventions for drives/partitions but it doesn't use the same method windows does of showing partitions as C, D, E etc. but rather sda for the first drive, sdb for the second and so on. The partitions will have numbers, the first partition of the first drive is sda1, second is sda2 etc. You can use either of the two commands below to show the drives/partitions and it will also show the size of the drive. You need to be root user to run the commands.

I'm not sure if Opensuse uses sudo. If so, just precede the above with sudo.
The image you posted only shows 3 hard drives so you will need to decide which is the one you want to use.

That would only be necessary if you have no unallocated space on any of the hard drives you have. You can select this unallocated space and create partitions on it on which to install any Linux. It doesn't matter if it is a primary or logical partition.

If you install Opensuse, you can then install Virtualbox or VMWare as an application and then install different operating systems within the virtual software to run inside Opensuse. That as opposed to installing differen Linux operating system on their own partitions.

Yes, Opensuse is one of over 500 different distributions of Linux.

Based on the partition layout you posted, you have obviously set up multi boot on your system. I see that you even have Windows 10 installed. Given this, it would be a lot more work than I first thought to put everything under openSUSE 13.2, so, at this point I am not suggesting that you do so. However, to answer your question, openSUSE 13.2 is an OS. Like any other OS (including Windows) that allows VMWare Player 7.2 to be installed as a program, openSUSE 13.2 with VMWare Player 7.2 will allow you to set and run virtual machines (not virtual drives). Virtual machines are emulations of the complete PC hardware in software and allow whatever OS that is running in the virtual machine to run as if it were running on actual hardware. Each virtual machine is a set of files that are stored on your hard drive like any other file.

My current suggestions are: (1) you could boot from that USB stick and install your Chrome OS into that 286.51 GB unallocated space on disk 1 on your computer; or (2) you could get VMWare Player 7.2 for Windows and install your Chrome OS into a virtual machine there.

I cannot find VMPlayer 7.2. I can find a lot of references to it but cannot find its download... not even of the VMWare site. The closest I find on that site is VMWare Player 6.0.1 as the latest version (even though there is a dropdown menu item called vmplayer 7).

I'm not sure how Opensuse got into the equation. Are you planning to install it or do you want to install Chrome? The link below is to the download of VMWare 7.2. I've never used it but apparently you need to register to download.

https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/det...duct_downloads

It looks like VMWare did another upgrade on VMPlayer. The latest download is here: https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/fre...on_player/12_0

xode recommenced installing Opensuse as the boot OS and then installing Chrome and W7 in virtual drives.

I think what I will do is a combination of these two ideas. I will keep my current drive in place and install the others in a new partition following xote's suggestion. At this point, I am not sure how much I will use Linux so might not stick to it? If I like the new configuration of OS systems, I can always delete the old W7.

I am currently, temporarily limited to a DSL so it is taking 24+ hours to download Opensuse!

xote thanks for the link

36 hour after starting the download of openSuse and 15 sec to the end, the download freezes and then timesout!! I hate DSL! Thankfully, this will end next week.

I have an even slower internet connection than yours: namely dial up. There would be no way I could download something like the openSUSE ISO image. Instead, have install DVDs mailed to me: https://www.osdisc.com/products/suse...dvd-64bit.html

WOW! Really? I didn't know dial up still existed! Thanks for all the help.

Hi,

Welcome to LQ!

I have DSL and get 10 Mbps down load speeds (translates to 1.3325 MBps). I am currently updating Slackware -current and see good download in about 20 minutes for getting '-current' and creating the ISO. Maybe you should do a http://www.speedtest.net/ to see if you are getting the speed you are paying for.

Hope this helps.
Have fun & enjoy!