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This isn't an exact copy of my previous question.

I have an ASUS K53U laptop with Windows 7 64-bit installed. I want it to dual-boot with Ubuntu (Linux-Secure-Remix, preferably). I have previously used WUBI on this laptop. I have an AMD processor, 698GB of hard drive space and 4GB of RAM.

Currently my partitions are arranged like this:

RECOVERY
Size: 25GB
Filesystem: ???
Used: ???
Free: ???

OS
Size: 300GB
Filesystem: NTFS
Used: 70.4GB
Free: 229GB

DATA
Size: 373GB
Filesystem: NTFS
Used: 206GB
Free: 166GB

total: 698GB

What I think I should do to install Ubuntu is this:

  1. Shrink DATA by about 100GB
  2. Create an extended partition in the space created
  3. Inside this extended partition,

    Make a 4GB swap
    Make about 32GB / (root)
    Everything else: /home

Is this a good scheme? Can I improve it? Will it work? How do I put it into practice? (is GParted fine?)

Thank you in advance!

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3 Answers 3

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This will work: this looks very much like what I do with my own laptop (the only differences are that I don't have a DATA partition and that sizes are different). I now create all my Ubuntu partitions within the extended partition and GRUB2 can start Ubuntu just fine in that configuration.

Please note the following however. In the past, I have used other custom bootloaders that would simply change the active partition dynamically during boot. This would not work in your case as the active partition must be a primary partition. This is probably not a problem as you will likely use GRUB2 to manage your multibooting.

The Ubuntu installer has an option to automatically reduce your Windows partitions and install alongside. If you want more control, you could indeed use Gparted to prepare your partitioning scheme. I believe it's also possible to manually resize your partitions in the Ubuntu installer, but it may feel a bit trickier there: Gparted sounds like a good choice to really see what you're doing. You will then need to select the last option in the installer to manually assign your partitions ("/", "/home" and "swap", plus the Windows partitions if you want to access them, just make sure not to format them!).

On a personal note, I still prefer to shrink my NTFS partitions directly from Windows (inside the Disk Management console or using the DISKPART utility and its SHRINK command), but it hardly seems to matter nowadays.

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  • I have heard that Windows partitions should be edited with Windows tools (diskpart) and Linux partitions should be edited with Linux tools (gparted) - is this true? Disk Management says that I can only shrink DATA by 3939MB. (screenshot) What do I do?
    – user210606
    Dec 8, 2013 at 12:01
  • NTFS support didn't use to be as reliable as it is now: using Linux tools should be safe nowadays (notwithstanding which I still prefer to use Windows when possible). Windows will not reorganize data when shrinking: it only allows you to reclaim unused contiguous space at the end of the partition. You probably have files already written here and there towards the end. In this specific case, I would recommend using Gparted for shrinking the partition (which will safely reorganize data). Always backup your data first! This said, I have successfully resized NTFS partitions with Gparted.
    – Alex
    Dec 8, 2013 at 13:52
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I think you are right, you can do it by Gparted in Ubuntu Live CD, first you can shrink the DATA 100GB by WIndows Disk Manager.

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I think it's ok too.

Take a look at this irc log to get some ideas of what you could do with those partitions.

http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2011/10/19/%23ubuntu-classroom.html

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