I searched for this but no hit answered my questions. I have a secondary hard drive to install Ubuntu (my primary is my main XP install). The drive is a 250 Gb drive, and I've partitioned 20 Gb for Ubuntu. The remaining ~230 Gb is filespace for my Windows drive.

I started the live CD and then clicked on install. When it got to the partitioning, I was presented with 3 options:

1. Wipe the 250 Gb drive and install Ubuntu (No!)
2. Install onto the largest free space
3. Manually partition.

I have more than 20 Gb free on the 230 Gb partition, so I wasn't sure if option 2 would automatically find the unconfigured 20 Gb partition or would it install onto the ~ 50 Gb free space on the 230 Gb partition.

When I chose option 3, it told me to allocate minimum 2Gb for / and minimum 256 Mb for swap. I did that, and that left ~ 18 Gb for the install. But there was no way to choose that - after selecting the 2 Gb partition for / and the ~ 512 Mb partition I created for swap, I was asked to select the remaining space for either /home, /var, /boot, etc. How many partitions do I need to create?? I figured I'd just want it to automatically decide for the remaining.

Or would it option 2 ignore the 230 Gb partition even though it has more than 20 Gb of space?

On another note, anyone know why the installer did not correctly pick up the system time from BIOS? Even though I had the time zone correctly, it was showing 5 hours behind.

This is confusing. I essence everything works from / so if you create no othr partitions then say for /home will be part of / partition. If you create a /home partition then it is seperate.. Most files will be in /usr so I would say if you left / as 2 gig you will run out of romm quickly. If it was me I would do it like this.
/ =2gig
/home = 2 gig
/usr = 8gig
/boot = 100mb
/var = 2gig
swap can be anything you wish. With 512meg of ram I doubt you will get into much. 256meg would be suffeniecent.
I would use remaining space as fat32 if you have none now. Then you can swap between both OSes easy any data.

Brian1

Let it install into the free space - it comes up with what I consider some wacky sizes, but let it go. It will use the unallocated space, not free space in that Windoze partition.
The (probable) reason you got into strife was only allocating the minimum 2 Gig for the root. If you want to manually configure, give it say 10 Gig (for the root), some swap, and a separate /home (a good option BTW). Should be sufficient.
The (extra) fat32 partition suggestion above is also a good one for exchanging data between the two operating environments - both will have native read/write support. Not necessary, but handy.

another reccomendation is make your swap twice your physical memory.

Perfect - thanks for the answers all! I'll try installing again.

Does anyone know why the install screwed up the system time?

Probably the default UTC offset doesn't agree with your location.
Never noticed, wouldn't care. You set your own location when you do the install.

I let it install on the free space and it seems to have worked! I also edited the menu.lst file so that I can dual boot.

Regarding the time, I found another thread where you edit a file to say UTC=no. Before this, even after the install it kept screwing up the system time, and the next time I booted into Windows the time would be a few hours off (even though both were set to Pacific US timezone). I'll see now if that fixed it.