partition for dual boot

[dabayman]

so ya, im kinda new to partitions and how to create one and all that fun stuff. All i know is that i just bought this laptop and immediately through kubuntu down on it. Now i want to dual boot vista on it. So when i inserted the disk at boot and went through the process, i got to the part where i was to decide what partition to install it on. There were 2 partitions there. Both were there when i bought the laptop, first one is 224.2 gig and second is 8.7 gig. Is the 8.7 gig one empty or not? Basicly what i want to know is, is it safe to install vista on the 8.7 gig or do i need to create another partition? If i need to, how do i?

[Guest]

Re: partition for dual boot

Heya dabayman,

I believe that 8.7 GB is a backup support for your system. It is a special feature offered by laptops of these brands: HP, Compaq, Dell, Sony. The BIOS/CMOS usually does the backup where it stores the current settings of the operating system and applications installed in that small space. When your operating system suddenly breaks down then you can easily restore it just like new with that back up.

By the way, 8.7 gb of space is totally not enough for a Windows Vista operating system.

I advice that you do a new install and have your drive partitioned properly with how much to allocate to Linux and how much for Windows. By the way, by default, new Linux flavours such as Kubuntu can read the file system of Windows (NTFS) and if you wish Windows to be able to open the file system of Linux, please visit this site: http://www.fs-driver.org/.

Hope that helps ya.

[Qqmike]

Re: partition for dual boot

Vista *** The definitive dual-booting guide: Linux, Vista and XP step-by-step
http://apcmag.com/dualboot

If you change the Vista partition, always use the Vista partitioning utility.
However, otherwise, to partition for Kubuntu, you may use GParted Live CD.
GParted: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

And I would agree with cris: don't mess with that small utility partition. Best to pretend it's invisible