Hey guys, so my new job had me install Linux on a laptop at work, the laptop will be handed off to multiple users, 3 total (for now)

The HDD is about 320gb, I believe. First, they just said "Install your flavor of linux", so I installed ubuntu 10.4.

Then he said "Make sure you split it into 3 partitions, all boot-able...

fml.

So I suck at managing partitions, I took up 100% of sda1. HTF do I split that up, without losing all of my data?

My guess is I would need to boot in from a bootable DVD, unmound sda1, then.... no idea from there.

Any help with this? Im googling it now, but id love to go into work and already know what to do, lol

boot a gparted CD

while installing itself it gives option to edit and resize the partition ...

Hi This link will be useful

http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_resi...xt3_partitions

I used gparted on a bootable CD, I shrank sda1 from 300 to 100gb, now made 2 other partitions, sda4 and sda5, I can install linux on both of them, but how do I set it up so it will prompt which one to boot into without having to use a boot CD like ultra boot?

You would install the Grub bootloader to the root partition of two of the systems and install it to the master boot record of the third. Usually simpler to install the last system to the mbr and it should detect the other two. Without your partition information, it would be difficult to give more specific advice. Generally, when installing Grub, you need to select an Advanced or Expert tab to get different options.

If you install GRUB each time you install to the MBR then the third install will have the final say. And it *SHOULD* pick up the other installations. The whole idea of 3 seperate installs, one for each user sounds bad to me, especially if each user is an Ubuntu "administrator" since each user would have total access to everyone elses files, settings, etc. A single install with multiple user accounts makes much more sense to me unless I'm missing something.