Spork - Staying In - Install Ubuntu

Partitioning is a bit like
dividing a building up
into seperate apartments

Plan your disk partitioning

Ok, it’s time step away from the computer and get out a pen and some paper, we’re going to make a plan for partitioning our hard drive.

A disk partition is what lets Windows and Ubuntu coexist peacefully on a single hard drive. Think of it as dividing the drive up into sections.

If you’re like most people, you won’t have done this before, and it can seem a little daunting. It’s really not difficult, so long as you have a little think ahead.

Boring but important bit: Before you do any actual partitioning (in the next step) back up all your data and defrag your hard drive in Windows!

Seriously, don't skip that step. It's tedious, but you'll cry if something goes wrong and you lose all your stuff. You can set the defrag running while you're planning your partitions, since it'll take a while.

First, find out how big your hard drive is. You can find out by checking the “Properties” of C Drive in Windows Explorer. The capacity will be shown in GB (Gigabytes). A gigabyte is basically 1,000 megabytes (MB). All we need to do is decide how big in MB each partition will be.

Ubuntu and Windows will each get their own partitions. That's because they use different “file systems”. All you really need to know about this is that Windows uses the NTFS system, and Ubuntu uses Ext3.

We're going to chop this
hard drive up into pieces!

Since partitioning isn’t necessarily something you know anything about, i’m going to suggest a plan for you. You can either follow this, or if you feel like you want to know more you can read the Psychocats partitioning guide for some alternative setups.

Windows will probably want something like 20,000MB. Check how much space it currently occupies on your C drive in Windows, then allow it a bit extra.

The remaining space can go to Ubuntu. We’re actually going to split that space into three further partitions. One will be called your “root” partition (often written simply as /), one will be a “home” partition (written as /home) and one will be a tiny partition called “swap”. The root contains the guts of the system, home will contain all your personal stuff and the swap is just a techy Linux thing.

So how big should they be?

Well, the root only needs to be about 6,000-10,000MB. Swap is tiny, only the size of your RAM memory (go to Control Panel > System to find out how much RAM you have) Home is for all your files, so can be as big as you like.

By the way, don’t stress too much about this. If you need to you can always resize partitions at a later date using the LiveCD (System > Admin > Partition Editor). So don’t freak out about getting it perfect.

Zem Sez:

This all seems very daunting, but all it is about is deciding how much space you’ll give to Windows, and how much to Ubuntu. It’s well worth having a read of the Psychocats website. It’s a bit long but will give you a better understanding. It’s also handy to talk to someone that has set up a dual-boot system before.
I have 37.2GB of space. Windows takes up 18.4GB, so I’ll give it 20GB. Of the remaining space (17.2GB) I’ll give the Ubuntu root partition 6GB and leave the rest for a nice big home partition for all my files. I have a funny amount of RAM, so my swap will be 700MB.