Loading ...How To: Dual Boot Vista and Ubuntu Gutsy(7.10)
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Foreword
This guide has been written with Ubuntu Gutsy(7.10) in mind, but should work for any other OS as well.
Intro
I’ve read several complaints stating that Ubuntu Gutsy’s partitioner was unbearably slow when resizing a Windows Vista NTFS partition. There were also some people asking why it wasn’t slow with Windows XP’s partition. The reason Gutsy isn’t slow when resizing the XP partition is because Windows XP and Windows vista have different versions of the NTFS file system. So basically, something in the code is written wrong, which makes the resizing of a Vista partition painfully slow. But there is another way of doing this without taking a 5 hour coffee break to install Gutsy. You can partition your drives right inside Vista itself. Using this process, I was able to partition, install, and tweak Gutsy in under an hour. Here’s the process I used to partition my hard drive:
Steps
Click Start
Go To Computer and Right-Click
Select Manage
Select Disk Management under Storage in the left hand hierarchy.
Right Click (C:)
Select Shrink Volume
Choose how much you want to partition off, and go.
That was easy wasn’t it? It’s also a heck of a lot quicker than waiting for Gutsy to do it.
Here’s my partition table after partitioning:
NOTE: Having certain features, such as thumbnails, enabled in Vista only allows you to partition a certain amount off your drive, so beware.
11 Comments
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November 7th, 2007 at 2:28 pm
i did that and it works great
thanks
how do you delete the partition?
November 7th, 2007 at 4:52 pm
David, You just right click on the partition you want to delete and select “Delete Volume”.
November 8th, 2007 at 5:42 pm
Hi,
I’m trying to partition my harddrives as you have mention above. But it’s already over an hour and the partition is not complete yet. My drive space is 110 mb and free space is around 70 mb.
Does it generally take this long? Or is there a problem with my vista?
November 8th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
No it should not be taking so long. Mine took about 5 minutes to partition. You should check your hard drive cables inside your computer. Unless you are using an external hard drive, in which case I have no experience. Also, is 70mb big enough to fit any OS on?
November 9th, 2007 at 7:51 am
Great, timely info. Many thanks.
November 12th, 2007 at 1:11 am
It’s ok now. Gutsy is working ok.
I have to fix the graphics card problem.
I restart my laptop and it took me 10 min partition my hdd.
Yeah, that was 70 GB not 70 MB.
December 14th, 2007 at 9:37 pm
Do i have to create an actual volume in order to install Ubuntu??
December 25th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
It is OK when utility in Vista is working. However there are countless cases when Vista would not shrink NTFS partition despite the fact that there is tens of GB free space. The problem is contiguous space. I have not find a solution to this despite trawling through googleland for two days
January 18th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
OK. Thanks. My partition is only 224mb. Is that too much? Hope its enough. And how do I get the OS on it? I want to use Ubuntu 7.10?
Thanks!
January 18th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
Hi, thanks for your suggestion,
but I have a little different problem about my partitions.
In my hard disk I have about 130 Gb where is installed vista. I would like to divide it in three partitions, one for vista, one for ubuntu and one for the data that I would like to read and write by using both operating system.
Do you have any other suggestion about that?
January 25th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Hello,
I am trying to add a partition for Ubuntu with Vista already installed on a computer I bought a couple days ago (so not much more than the OS is on the computer at this point).
I’m unable to shrink the volume due to an error stating “There is not enough space availabe on the disk(s) to complete this operation.” I’ve checked around and found many people to have this same problem, but nothing that can make it work for me.
Any suggestions on how I can get past this error?
Thanks.