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Currently I do have Win-XP (C: partition) which is the system & primary partition. Win7 is the boot partition and the logical drive.

I want to replace Win-XP with Ubuntu 10.04 desktop. After I restarted with the Ubuntu CD all went well until the partitioning. The installer screen displayed that win7 was in dev/sda1 and the rest dev/sda2 it suggested to install Ubuntu.

When I checked the disk size it points dev/sda1 to C: partition which is where Win-XP is installed. While the other partition E: is where my win7 is. This could be due to the boot loader residing in the C: partition or c being the system partition. When I try to manually changes I selected dev/sda1 where the Ubuntu should be installed & tried to resize the partition but it freezes.

What am i not doing correctly? Thanks

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Sorry, but as far as I know doing it is actually impossible. The Problem is that Windows' partitions need to be the first on the disc because Windows' boot system looks for the first active partition on your hard drive, so if you put Ubuntu at first it will try to boot Ubuntu and it's Windows boot system, sure that it will fail.

What to do:

  • Organize Windows partitions:

    • Boot on Win7 and defragment it's partition ( it may take time ):

      • Open Disk Defragmenter ( Start> All Programs> Accessories> System Tools> Disk Defragmenter ), select the drive to be defragmented and click on the Defragment Disk button.

        Disk Defragmenter

    • Open Disk Management ( In the Control Panel search box type "partition", then click in the link “Create and Format Hard Disk Partitions” under Administrative Tools ) Create and Format Hard Disk Partitions

      then delete WinXP partition and move Win7 partition to the begining of the hard drive.

      Disk Management

  • Install Ubuntu:

    • Boot through the Ubuntu Live CD and choose "Try Ubuntu" when prompted.

    Try Ubuntu

    • Wait for the desktop to load and open Gparted ( System > Administration > GParted )

    Open GParted

    • If there already is a free space after Win7 partition simply click on the Unallocated Space and create a new partition to Ubuntu, if the Windows partition is occupying the whole disk you will need to resize it to free space to the new Ubuntu partition.

    Gparted

    • Then you just need to install Ubuntu into the new partition.
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I would try to remove the Windows XP partition first and then select the option "Use the largest continuous free space".

One way to delete the XP partition is to boot the Ubuntu livecd and select "Try Ubuntu", than start GParted from System > Administration. Inside GParted select the partition and delete it, than apply changes. Be warned thought; this will remove everything in that partition.

Hope this helps! /Linus Unnebäck

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