urgent - installation stuck while partitioning
 

I was (am) installing Ububtu 7.10 on top of the previous one (6.10 I
think) into my laptop when the installation suddenly stopped. The panel it 4/7, in English probably something like "Preparing partitions". The mouse moves and I can even open the terminal, but the partitioning conversation does not accept any input, neither mouse nor keyboard.

I have XP in the first partition so I did not touch that, but deleted
all other partitions and started filling the free space from there.
I have created one FAT32 and one ext3 for root. That's where it stopped, so now I cannot go forward or backward. I would not like to power off in the middle of partitioning, though I'd think it has not yet touched the
actual partitions. Is there something else I can do?

I thought that was the thing to do if you want to repartition. I do not
know any way to uninstall Ubuntu and I didn't want to wipe out its
partitions from outside, because that would leave Grub in MBR which
might confuse the system while booting. Did I think wrong?

Thanks for any help!!

Eeva

OK, two questions:

What would happen if I restart the installation at this phase?

How should I repartition to I avoid this happening? (Maybe I should
mention that all new partitions are logical, so I did not run out of primaries.)

Thanks for any informed guesses!

Eeva

GRUB has no effect on booting an iso so there deleting your Ubuntu partitions should be fine. If you find that for some reason the installer fails to partition, try gparted or SystemRescue livecds to partition first, then launch the installer and use the partitions you already prepared.

As long as you didn't confirm that the new partitions can be written out to disk, your current partitions should still be fine if you reboot.

I do not see the point of creating a fat32 partition now. Just stick with the Linux native type; you can always create a fat32 partition when you are done installing. And why, by the way, do you need fat32? That file system has so many limitations that you may as well use ntfs instead to share files with xp.

Thank you, Jay, I restarted the installation and it is now happily going ahead.

The reason I didn't want to let the system loose with obsolete Grub was
that my tiny laptop has everything hanging from usb ports, also CD/DVD
and sometimes the boot goes to hard disk before CD drive wakes up
(probably some kind of timing problem) so I thought maybe when it reads Grub, Grub wants to read something from the Linux disk (the list of
bootables?) and gets confused when it does not find the disk. Well,
when you do not know anything, you have to invent ....

The reason for FAT32 is that I just installed eCS (OS/2) in my desktop
and depending of how it behaves, I might want it in my laptop, too.
I am still very much experimenting what I really want. I have written a lot of stuff (OK, simple stuff like REXX scripts and X2 macroes) on Warp and do not want to lose it all. But if it seems easier, I may rewrite everything on Linux. eCS does not read either NTFS or ext2/3, but I can always reformat, if I do not need FAT. In the desktop I've already
created partitions for Linux, because I can not let it touch MBR, not
even the partition table, so I am a bit worried about how Linux
installation will go there.

OK, installation just finished and seems to be satisfied. Thanks again!

Eeva