Ubuntu and partitioning question

Dont be at yourself

I'm going to dip my toe into the murky waters of linux, but before I do so, I'd like some advice.

I've decided on installing Ubuntu (Dapper Flight 5) alongside my existing XP installation, but was a little put-off by the aparant user unfriendlyness of the installation procedure. Basically, I'm afraid of ****ing up my windows install by incorrectly partitioning my disc. So, I wonder is it advisable to create partitions using something like Partition Magic through Windows XP? If so, what partitions need I create (ie size and file system?)

And I've another related question. I've got an external drive, half full of all my movies, music etc. The problem is, it's NTFS, which I hear Ubuntu wont read and write without some coaxing. Seeing as I'm a linux noob, would I be better off to format this drive to something more Linux-friendly? If so, if I were to format it one half at a time (and move my movies/music to the other half so as not to delete them), would that be advisable?

Thanks in advance,
nakey

Stephen

The partitioning is a piece of piss if you've got free, unpartitioned space on your disk already. If you don't its a bit more complicated - you'd have to resize your existing partition using whatever tools are available to you. (QtParted seems to be a popular free one, google it).
Once you have unpartitioned space, ubuntu can create its own partitions there easily during the install process. Ubuntu's partitioner is text based and not as user friendly as the one you get with other distributions such as suse, but its not that hard to use. You don't need to worry about defining the partitions yourself, once there's free space the Ubuntu partitioner will set up an ext root partition and a small swap partition, then you're good to go.

Its pretty easy to get ubuntu to read NTFS partitions, but I would not recommend writing to them, as write support for NTFS is quite crap under linux, and you run the risk of trashing your data.

See here - applies to Ubuntu 5.04 but its the same for 5.10. Dunno about Dapper since that's still prerelease and all.
If you do want to format it so that both Linux and Windows have read/write access to it, format it as a FAT32 partition.

Ubuntuguide.org and ubuntuforums.org should come in pretty useful for you.

Dont be at yourself

I see. As it stands, my internal (where both OS would be installed) is just one big partition taking up the entire drive. So, before proceeding with the installation, should I chop that in half before I run the install, or will Ubuntu do all that too?

Stephen

If it was me, I would resize the NTFS partition before install. I assume you've plenty of free space within the NTFS partition? If not you'll have to clear some. Some people also recommend defragmenting the disk before resizing the partition.
You can download the "System Rescue CD" iso which you can burn and then boot from. This has QtParted and some other useful linux tools setup and ready to run from the CD.
I used this method to resize the NTFS partition on my laptop before installing ubuntu 5.10, and it worked fine. That said, I had loads (>50%) of free space on the NTFS partition to play with. I split my 100gb disk into 80 gigs for Windows and the remainder (roughly 15) for Ubuntu.
I mounted the NTFS partition read only within ubuntu for access to mp3s and stuff on it.

Dont be at yourself

Cheers.

I think I'd like to be able to write to the external drive while in Linux though, so I may format that to FAT32. Any reason not to do that?

Stephen

Nope, not if its just used for storage. I use that method myself for transferring stuff from Linux to Windows, as I've no idea how to mount ubuntu's ext3 partition in Windows.

seanos

It's not that hard to mount ext3 to windows, fair few programs/win services to do it, word of warning, unless unmount before reboot/shutdown, can screw up ext3 partition.