Partioning Problems Help!
 

SO I'm trying to partition my current windows c drive (of 224 gigs, not including the healty EISA) for ubuntu, (I have only used about half of it and have 115 gigs of free space), But when I go to the shrink volume option I can only shrink it down to 13 gigs I know this is not enough and want to know why windows doesn't let me use all of that free space, and if there is a work around or fix so I can have at least 50 gigs of free space for a separate ubuntu drive and 1 gig swap drive

Thanks

Did you boot from a live cd? And what are you using for partitionning?

thanks for getting back so fast and yes I have live CD, but I'd rather have Linux boot straight from my machine (after an install) and not from a disk , and haven't eve booted or installed ubuntu yet because I'd like more space, I'm using the windows disk management tool to shrink my current C drive for a partition

If you choose *install* Ubuntu from the live cd, you will be able to resize (shrink) your windows partition (during the install process) and to install Ubuntu alongside windows.

Thank so Much I'll try that

The reason that you can only shrink partition by 13 Gigs is that you already shrank it before, Windows disk management will only shrink upto 50%.
Using a live-cd is the only option to shrink more, but that also depends on how full your c:/ drive is.
If you have free space gparted-live works quite well.

So I just created a live CD to partition and use Linux and put it in to boot but I keep getting this error

Error 0400 reading Sector 354294

It just repeats again and again Linux will not load

any thoughts fixes or ideas as to how to remedy this

I'd also recommend defragging your Windows disk first as it may have files scattered all over. You need a large chunk of contiguous space to put Linux in and this may enable you to get enough free space using the Windows tools.
Always do at least one full backup before messing with partitions...

For the CD, did you burn it slowly eg x5? Fast burns sometimes don't take. Obviously burn as iso image, not as file, and check the checksum usually available from the website, before using.

use windows ??? what ???
XPsp3,vista,7,7sp1

use the windows tools to "clean" the drive first

The normal everyday "spring cleaning " one should do twice a year anyway on windows

empty trash
clean out the temp files
defrag
then RE defrag

the second time will go quicker

back up your data

back up your data

back up your data

back up your data

then resize the partition

At which step in the install process do you get that error? The more precisely you will describe what happened, the easier it will be to troubleshoot the install.

And, as others already mentioned, you should first backup whatever important data you may have.

Looks like the OP is using Windows Vista
Anyway I have a Vista machine that doesn't know how to write iso's with it's burning software, I downloaded CdBurnrXP to splve the issue

On the odd occasion I've burned in MSWin, ImgBurn did a good job.

CdBurnrXP is a good program
a little bit slow because it is a cygwin program

do not let the name fool you
-- yes it sounds like one of those virus installers

but it is a real program
http://cdburnerxp.se/en/home