My laptop used to have windows 7 which I had upgraded to windows 8.1 and then to windows 10 and along with them I used to have ubuntu. The disk partitions used to look like ([System Reserved], [recovery partition provided by dell], C [windows boot], E [documents, music and stuff], [swap], [ubuntu]). Whenever I ran in a problem and had to reinstall ubuntu, I would do so using the something else option (create swap and / partition, both logical partitions).
My hard disk crashed a few days ago and I had to replace it. So I installed windows 7 on it again and then upgraded to windows 10. Now I'm trying to install ubuntu like I always did. But this time the disk space I leave for ubuntu is showing up as unusable in the setup. Windows has created a 450MB recovery partition this time and so (I think) the extra space which used to be marked 'free space' in disk management is now marked as unallocated (and so showing up as unusable in ubuntu setup). The partitions look like this: ([System reserved], C, [unnamed Recovery Partition], E [documents and stuff], [unallocated]) [System reserved]: System, Active, Primary Partition C: Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition E: Primary partition
I have no idea how the recovery partition got created. Although googling it suggests that it is something new with win 8 and 10, it never got created on my old hard disk. There is no option to delete the recovery partition, right clicking it in disk management gives only a help option which links to a page for disk management. So any solutions?
Edit: I just remembered that when I did not have ubuntu installed, the E partition and free space, as a whole, would show up as extended partition in disk management, which is no more the case.