Problem Installing with Manual Partitioning
 

Since i don't want a repeat of last time when i installed Gutsy and managed to erase my Windows Partition in the process, i'm asking for help this time.

When i Click Manual for the Partitioner and i select the 30GB i Allocated Earlier for Ubuntu (Hardy this time), it will tell me " Error: No root file system defined"

What does this mean?

I can't tell you exactly why this happened, but I can tell you that it's happened to me numerous times before with Ubuntu. I can never keep Ubuntu names straight - Hardy is 8.04, right? I'm guessing you're using older hardware and/or mixed SATA/IDE or just IDE?

regardless, I was only able to get through this by using the option "Use largest free contiguous space" (or something to that effect) and then check it before you do the actual install to be sure it's not overwriting Windows. This, of course, assumes that you specified the mount point of the newly created partition to be '/'. If you didn't - go do that first.

This is one of the complaints I have with Ubuntu - it's very good if it understands your hardware, but it's a nightmare if it doesn't - especially during install. Otherwise, it's a great distro.

When you use manually partitioning, you are in control which partitions to create, how large they are and what they are used for. You need at least a swap partition and a root partition. Look at the controls and see if there is either a drop down list or a text entry to define the mount point. The swap partition doesn't have a mount point. The root partition is "/". If you create another partition for home, the mount point is "/home".

Got it working, thanks for clearing it up!