Good Morning!

Well, I have GOOD NEWS! In preparing for the move to the Lake house, I stumbled across a copy of Kbuntu 7.10. Not wanting to screw up my 80 gig Maxtor Diamond Plus 9 hard drive, I found an old, Maxtor 8.4 gig hard drive to try and load said Kbuntu distro on.

Well, it came up and when I got to the partitioning part, I set it for 2 gigs for the swap partition and the rest for the .dat file. Hmmmmmm, Kbuntu said I needed a root partition, but no matter how hard I tried, I could not figure out how to do that. It didn't give me the option of naming, then setting aside and amount for the root. It has either 2 gigs for swap and 6 for data OR the whole drive would be formatted as one entity.

Now, with the 80 gig hard drive, I'd like to set aside 36 gigs for just WIN 2000 Pro data, no O/S, 2 gigs for a swap drive and the rest (40 gigs) for a Kbuntu/whatever Linux drive.

My question is HOW do I accomplish this so it will dual-boot with my C primary WIN 2000 Pro Drive?

I have a LOT of Excel spreadsheets on the "C" drive I don't want ruined or "lost", so I need the simplest, safest, way to accomplish the partitioning, formatting, dual-booting process.

I certainly have appreciated ALL of Y' all's help in the past. May GOD, THE CREATOR, bless each one of you and your families. With my challenge become worse, I want to learn Linux before my dementia gets so bad I will never learn Linux.

Oh, for those of you who are Mother's, Mother's who are also Dad's, and Dad's who have to be Mom's as well, have a great Sunday with your kids.

Respectfully submitted,
Best Regard,

Buck
Amateur radio: KA5LQJ

I understand that you have 80 GB Hard drive.36 GB you have planned to keep for Windows.What I can see is You have luckily got kubuntu 7.10(quite old, you can try out the new 10.04 for quick updates).
Anyway if you want to have hands on Ubuntu Linux, no issue let me help you with the setup.
Here I go..

Say, You have 36 GB allocated to C: drive of Windows.Just Boot the Ubuntu CD.
When the partitioning screen gets displayed, you need to check for NTFS or vFAT entry. Dont disturb this partition.(thats windows partition you want to keep safe).
Click on Free Space row and select ubuntu to install on the top of that.\
In Minimal you can create 2 partitions - / and swap.
Based on RAM, you need to allocate swap space.If its 512 MB RAM present, it should be double of RAM.
If its 2 GB, you can allocate 2GB(its sufficient).
Optionally , if you want you can create various partitions like /home,/usr, /opt,/tmp based on the requirement.

Hope it clear few % of your doubt.

You can refer this link for dual boot http://digitalgraphy.wordpress.com/t...ual-partition/

1 members found this post helpful.

Hi All,

Well, I got a surprise when I booted up the computer this morning. The normal screens came up, then one that said to select either Win 200 Pro OR Ubuntu, but not which distro, . That was on the 40 gig Western Digital (37 gigs formatted).

Now, with the dual-boot loader on "C", I'm not sure how much space is left. I think before there was at least 30 gigs for 2000 Pro, O/S and programs. That's fine with me, I hope to leave it that way.

Now, again, I'm cornfused, my understander, my brain, doesn't process the information as it used to. What I need to DO to get the 80 gig, (78 gigs, formatted) Maxtor partitioned with a little less than half partitioned and formatted as a WIN drive for just "data", "pictures" and "music". I'll need a 2 gig 'swap' file, some amount for ./root, but not sure if I'll need a .dat, .bin, .whatever folders to make it secure and run effortlessly.

I know, I'm a pain-in-the-glutinous-maximus But, I'm 63 years old and my brains are turning into "goo". I want to learn LINUX to be able to use the digital programs for my Amateur (Ham) Radio and enjoy my hobby to the end.

If you can help me on my "Quest", please post here so others can learn as well.

Thanks in advance,
GOD BLESS,
Best Regard,

"Buck"/KA5LQJ