Can someone just tell me the best way to partition everything? I've got XP running on a 60gig partition of a 500gb SATA drive. The remaining space is all important data (and music), but it's backed up so can I use computer management in XP to format this and split it into another partition for Linux to sit on? Does it need to be FAT32 formatted? How big? My other two drives (750 and 1tb) pretty much only contian contain .avi and .mkv files.

Gonna have a fiddle tonight when I get home from work. Thanks.

The linux install disk will handle partitioning for you. Use it to resize your NTFS partition(s). Then create a tiny (half a gig will do) swap partition, then partition the rest of the space as etx3 or ext4 and select / as the mount point for it.

I was with you until the ext3 part

Your partition table should look somewhat like this:
| Windows (60gb) | SWAP (0.5gb) | / (rest of gbs) |

You can achieve this using the Linux installer

You're not going to separate the home directory? Interesting.

Also don't use ext3, use ext4.

WTF is this ext3/4 stuff?

Burnt my Kubuntu disc and couldn't even get the Live CD to work. It just gave me a load of DOS looking bollocks and I gave up. The prompt said something like "unbuntu@ubuntu" and it was talking about sudo and administrators etc. Got pissed off with it and went back to XP.

Ext3 and ext4 are file systems like NTFS, FAT etc. It sounds like your CD did not burn correctly, try burning at a slower speed.

Right, thanks. So 60gb of XP, then my data, then both the Linux partition and the swap partition have to be ext4?

I burnt the disc at 12x and ran the check from the boot menu and it reported it was fine.

Have you tried just installing and not going down the Live CD route?

For partitioning I recommend:

Windows - whatever size you like. If you want to access your files from within Linux I recommend 'editing' the partition, selecting NTFS as the file system and giving it a mount point of "/Windows". Make sure the box for formatting the partition is unticked and the installer will leave it alone. This way you will be able to access the Windows partition from within Linux, which makes transferring files easier.

Swap - Just select 'swap' as the filesystem and select a size. No more than 1GB should easily do it.

Linux - now it depends if you want to separate the home directory or not - I generally do as it makes upgrading easier. You however, might not want to. So either:

Have one partition with whatever size (20-30GBs) and use the mount point "/" with ext4.

Or have two partitions, one system partition with a size of 15GBs with the mount point "/" with ext4

And then another partition of around 10GBs (depending of course on how much you want to store) with the mount point "/home" and ext4.

Wanted to try live to just have a look around KDE and familiarize. Also wanted to check that my hardware was compatible.

I think I understand what you're saying, but could you please explain what difference seperating "home" makes?

It is customary in Linux to separate your home directory from the rest of the system.

Whereas on Windows you would usually find My Documents under the C:, though you can move it to another partition and the shortcut on your Desktop still point to your My Documents. Under Linux, you c an do the same.
The only advantage of this is that if the OS gets corrupt then you can reinstall without losing your data. Though I can't see how it helps with upgrades nowadays.

In UNIX/Linux, you appear to have a single file system because there is no concept of drives. Disks (hard drives, CD drives, etc) become devices and are mounted onto the file system at certain places.
Your file system starts with the root (/), you will see various folders under here (usually /dev, /devices, /etc, /export, /home, /opt, /usr, /var, /tmp, and maybe others). Your home directory will probably be under /home or /export/home...

I don't have a Linux box here, but let me demonstrate using Mac how external disks get mounted:
I've inserted a CD, and the icon has appeared on my desktop. However, this is only a link to the mount point (where the CD file system can be accessed from my disk). I know that the disk is mounted into /Volumes on OS X, and if I use the Terminal, I can see that's true:

Here you can see me changing to the Volumes directory, using the `ls` command (like dir in DOS) and you can see my three hard drives and the CD "WAP54G".
If I want to look at my DVD images, I could go to the Volumes directory, then go into the Neled folder and I'd be on my third hard drive, but it would feel seamless, I wouldn't know I was on another drive. Alternatively, I could double click the "Neled" icon on my Desktop and it'd do the same thing.

In UNIX (not sure about Linux), mostly everything is a file, so you can find the raw disk within the file system if you need/want to, you can even find out what processes are running just by looking at the file system, because each process is represented by a file!

Hope that helps and wasn't too much

Both. Thanks. It's been a long weekend, but I might have another go shortly.

Thanks to everyone contributing on this thread, you're giving me something to think about and do.

I have the same problem with Ubuntu 9.10 at the moment, so I'm still using 9.04. No great hardship, but there are quite a few with the same issue.

It gave me the option to "install Kubuntu as a program" then boot into it. That didn't work either.

Thanks gav. If I'm not the only one, there must be something wrong. I'll sit tight for a minute and see what happens.

*ahem* Mint



/runs away