Ubuntu

I am trying to dual boot on an external USB 500GB drive using my laptop.I have Windows 7 installed and booting on 1st partition 230GB now as active primary, 2nd partition is 100GB as primary, and 3rd partition is 135GB as primary. I was intending on installing Ubuntu onto the 2nd partition. I read the article "How to dual boot Windows XP and Linux (XP installed first) -- the step-by-step guide with screenshots". It seems to say that Ubuntu will install alongside Windows in the same partition. Is this true? Can it be installed into it's own partition and dual boot along with windows? Thanks.

No, Linux cannot install into the same partition as Windows. It may be able to shrink the size of the windows partition so it can make a new one.

OK, so it probably would take the 2nd partition in my case?

Well, Windows often hogs several partitions these days. It could be third or fourth.

Well in my case Windows 7 is on the 1st active partition. So I'd hope that Ubuntu would take the second. I should make an image backup of this external drive with Paragon backup before proceeding since I've got a few hours spent setting it up so far.

Notice that Linux usually uses not one but several partitions (=filesystems). Installing all in one partition is possible but in the long run not a very good idea, IMHO.

The partition layout i found most satisfying over time is like the following, but i have to admit i don't have any Windoze-partitions on any of my systems.

Code:

/boot    128MB
/        10G
/home    5G
swap     =RAM

I usually put the "/home", "/" and "swap" in a LVM volume group leaving the remainder of the disk free, so that i can add space to any filesystem which might need it later.

"/" only contains system files and usually 10G is sufficient. Most of my installations take initially about 2GB, which will grow later as updates run in, but 10G should work for some time.

"/boot" only holds the kernel image and some GRUB-configuration files. 128M will be all you ever need. Habitually i put this partition at the beginning of my disks, because many years ago Linux was not able to boot from a disk cylinder >=1024. These times are long gone, but habits die hard. It needs to be on a separate partition because Linux cannot boot from an LVM partition.

"swap" equal the size of your RAM is a good starting point. If the usage pattern of your system is not completely far out of the normal average it will be OK. Once your system starts paging heavily on a regular basis you should consider upgrading your RAM anyway.

How much you need in "/home" depends on you. You will probably have to fine-tune this. If you use an LVM you can dynamically make the FS bigger. I have usually several Linux/Unix-distributions on my laptop, so i share the LVM partitions and make sure every distro uses the same UID for my user. This way i can share my HOME directory in different distributions.

When installing several distributions in a multi-boot system i give every distribution its own "/" filesystem, but they share the swap and the "/home". They all start from the same "/boot".

I hope this helps.

bakunin

Windows tends to have several partitions these days. It doesn't show you them all. So Linux may end up the third, or fourth. If you make one of them an extended partition, you can subdivide it as you please.