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I'm attempting to install Ubuntu on my laptop to dual boot with Windows 7.

I have a single 320GB hard drive with the following breakdown:

sda1 (fat16) 41.1  MB (not sure what this one is for)
sda2 (ntfs)  104.9 MB (not sure what this one is for either)
sda3 (ntfs)  64.4  GB (Windows 7 is installed here)
sda4 (ntfs)  220.0 GB (Separate partition where I keep photos, music, etc...)
free space   35.5  GB ("unusable" ???)

I was planning to install Ubuntu on those 35.5 GB of space, but when attempting to do so it says that the space is "unusable". It won't let me format or do anything else with it.

What can I do?

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are those partitions primary or extended ? Cause in ms-dos format table you can have only 4 primary partitions.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_partitioning – Denwerko Jul 21 '11 at 14:30

1 Answer

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Likely you have four primary partitions.

To rectify this, you would need to remove a partition, replace it with an Extended Partition, then use logical partitions within that Extended Partition to get more than 4 partitions onto the drive.

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I used the free Partition Wizard to change the sda4 partition from Primary to Logical instead of removing & replacing - took only a few seconds. Installation is now underway. Thanks! – Mike Jul 21 '11 at 15:12
Was still the same issue. Regardless of the cause, if the answer helped solve your issue, you should mark answers as the solution then. – The Lord of Time Jul 21 '11 at 15:13
1  
I did... hours ago. – Mike Jul 21 '11 at 21:05

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