Dual Booting on an HP with a recovery partition.

[Niles]

Hey,

I hope this post is in the right place.

Can I safely dual boot Linux and windows XP on a HP media center (m260n)? When I get to the partitioning screen for Ubuntu it looks like it will format the recovery partition along with the windows partition. It's a 120G drive with a 20G recovery partition, and Ubuntu wants to format 120G not just the 100G currently used by windows. Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Niles

 

[Nitestick]

i don't think the recovery partition is necessary, but don't take my word for it. generally a linux dual boot with windows will work best if you make the windows partition first, install windows, then partition and format the remaining space for linux and install.

 

[joshd]

use partition magic to make ur windows 20-40GB smaller, and then knok off another 1GB for swap space. use partition maging to format the big partition as ext3, and then format the small 1GB partition as linux swap.

when installing ubuntu, set it to install on the ext3, and use the other one as swap space. tell it not to use ur windows partition.

ubuntu works fine with my dell utility partition. if, like mine it is a partition you can boot to, you will not be able to boot to it without modifying grub.

when installing, allow grub to be installed onto the mbr. if all goes wrong, you can always boot off the cd to recovery console, and "fixmbr"

hope this helps

 

[Niles]

Alright, Ill give it a shot. Thanks both of you for your help.

 

[Amd2800]

no u need to format windows and partition 50gb each n reinstall windows and then install Linux

 

[joshd]

^^^

i didnt need to do that. resizing the partitions is fine.

 

[Alvin.C]

Re:

Hello,

Have you burnt a set of recovery discs for your HP?