Dual booting without repartitioning

[Alan McKinnon]

On Saturday, 25 February 2006 03:49, Nathan Krasnopoler wrote:
> I forgot to mention that I'm technically knowledgeable to
> understand much of any of that, but does it mean that i can install
> it normally, without repartitioning?

Yes, you can. During the install process, there is a section all about 
partitioning. Don't take the default configuration, select the 
advanced/manual one instead. (I don't recall what the screen looks 
like, but it is fairly obvious what to do)

Tell the installer to put / on the 5GB partition, select your 
filesystem of choice (probably ext3 or reiserfs), and to reformat. So 
much for the 5G.

For the 85G partition: Select it, and tell the installer to mount it 
at some suitable place and to not reformat. The place to install it 
depends on what the partition is and what's on it, which you haven't 
mentioned. If it's a Windows install, then /mnt/win is a good place. 
If it's home directories from a previous distro, then you might want 
it at /home. There are many possibilities.

The installer will also want to know where your swap partition is. If 
you have one from a previous distro, use that. If not, you might have 
to create some space for it.

If you need more help, send us the output of 'fdisk -l', a description 
of what's on each partition, and your ideas on what you want to 
achieve.

>
> C Hamel wrote:
> > On Thursday 23 February 2006 22:36, Nathan Krasnopoler wrote:
> >> *I have a HP computer with about 85 gigabytes free on the main
> >> partition, and 5 gigabytes being used on a second partition for
> >> recovery.  Is there a way to dual boot Ubuntu on the 5 gig
> >> partition, and still use files on the other one with linux?*
> >
> > I don't see why not, if I understand what you're attempting. 
> > Here's my scheme:
> >
> > I have one 19GB partition that was formerly /home for Gentoo; I
> > have one 10GB partition containing kubuntu Breezy 5.10
> > w/KDE-3.5.0; I have one 5GB partition containing Dapper Flight4. 
> > Both Breezy & Dapper utilize the 19GB /home partition from their
> > own respective /home/user partions via symlinks to the main data
> > directories, while each maintains its own skeleton directories. 
> > Those skeletons which are common --i.e., .gnupg, moneydance,xine,
> > etc.-- are also symlinked to the original /home partition.
> >
> > # fdisk -l
> > Disk /dev/hda: 60.0 GB, 60011642880 bytes
> > 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7296 cylinders
> > Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
> >
> >    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
> > /dev/hda1   *           1        2344    18828148+   7  HPFS/NTFS
> > /dev/hda2            2345        2438      755055   82  Linux
> > swap / Solaris /dev/hda3            2439        3655     9775552+
> >  83  Linux /dev/hda4            3656        7296    29246332+   f
> >  W95 Ext'd (LBA) /dev/hda5            3656        4507    
> > 6843658+  83  Linux /dev/hda6            4508        7296   
> > 22402611   83  Linux

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five