LinuxQuestions.org - Ubuntu duel book with windows

Well, that is interesting. I see no photo there.

But no matter. You can post to this forum from the Live Session.

First off we need to know what your hardware is.

Does your box use BIOS or UEFI?

If you don't know then tell us what Win Version the thing was installed with when new. That will settle that question.

Next all we really need to know that we would get from your image is what size are the partitions and what are their labels.

The entire drive is undoubtedly used. Therefore it appears full. It is not.

The first two partitions are the ones you need to run Win. The first should be fairly small. This is your boot sector. Never mess with that.

The second is your Win OS proper. It is not full and can be shrunk but only shrink it to the left toward the boot sector so that their beginnings don't change (that is the left end of the gparted graphic display of your partitions or any other liniar graphic display for that matter).

The other two partitions are what you can really do things with. One should be a "recovery" partition. It has tools for fixing things. Not very good tools but they are tools. It is several times bigger than needed, If you have, as you should but probably don't, the install media for your Win version you don't need that partition at all.

If you don't have the install disk shrink that partition so that it is about twice as big as the actual used space in it. So if it is 50G, say, and has 5G of data in it shrink it to 10G.

The last partition is worthless. It is where all the advertising for application you don't want come from to infest your desktop courtesy of your computers manufacturer. Delete it.

If you have done that, including keeping the shrunken recovery partition, you now have 3 partitons. Asuming, for now, that you have a Bios type computer (W7 and before) you also have a MSDos partition table. That is restricted to 4 primary partitions. You really need to have at least 2 for Ubuntu. You need at least a root partition (/) and a swap partition. That makes 5 and will not work.

You need to make one partition out of all of your now free space. This needs to be an "extended" partition. This is a special type of "primary" partition. You can do this with gparted and simply use the option in the dialog box to sellect "extended" as the "type" of partition.

When that is done you will have 4 partitions. The important thing is that your extended partition can have "logical" partitions within it self.

So now you need to go into it and create those logical partitions You will see that the type is automatically set for "logical" as that is all that will be created there. They work just like primary partitions.

Before doing that we need to know what size that extended partition is. Then we can argue about the correct size and number for your new install of Ubuntu.

I will declare myself as a diehard for a /, /home and /swap. You need to have a /swap. You have to have a /. A /home will make any kind of situation that may require you to either recover information or reinstall your system just a whole lot more pleasant.

So if you can simply tell us what the all four of your partitions sizes are, and what they are labeled and what the complete size of your HDD is we can go from there.

A bit more information that would be helpfull is the make of your computer and what makes it run.

If you would go to your terminal in Live Session and run;

Code:

sudo lspci

simply copy past that to the terminal and hit enter.

Copy paste the entire output of that command and we will be very happy.

I have not looked at an Ubuntu installer in about 4 years. But at that time there was an automagical "feature" to "install next too" some pre existing OS. I would highly recommend you NOT take that option. You are turning over to a script the partitionin of you hdd. Just not the sort of thing that I want to do. Manual partitioning before you start the installer is a much better option.

Yes it appears pretty scary. It isn't in actuallity very hard. If it were I wouldn't be able to do it.

No I don't run Win any more. I do administer a Vista/Debian8 dual boot. I have 4 internal drives on this box and 8 installs of Gnu/Linux OS's. 2 Debian Stable (Jessie), 1 Mageia Stable (5), 2 Debian Unstable (sid) and 3 Debian testing (stretch). That makes 8 / partions and 3 /home partitions as the 2 Jessies share a /home, 1 testing and 1 sid share a /home and the other 4 share the other /home.

I am pretty sure we can get your drive partitioned an up and running very quickly.