Partition problem in Windows XP

Its better to read community document on partitioning and follow instructions.You ll understand how to do your own

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HowtoPartition

I think the problem might have occurred because of the filesystem you have specified say ex4, during installation. The above mentioned link works when you have ubuntu installed already and you can modify the partition using Gparted. Anyway, your problem seems to be something which has been encountered during installation.

I assume you had selected manual partitioning.
Here is how you you can achieve the partitioning without any trouble.

Choose manual partitioning, dont let it use the whole disk in case you want window to function normally.
There will be a colored bar where you can see 40 GB in Blue color used for Windows n other around 40 GB unused or other installation as ur installation last time caused the filesystem to be other than NTFS or FAT unreadable by windows and little amount of swap memory.

Select the 40 GB say sda1/2 , select the option format partition, and mount point root, filesystem ex3. proceed to next.
confirm formatting. (dont delete swap partition)
and your partition is created.
Next is import account from windows, click on the check box. It will import ur themes from windows accounts.
Thats it proceed to next.

In case you get stuck mail me the snapshot of ur selections.

thtsarjun(at)gmail(.)com

I'm running Ubuntu from the live cd. I do in fact have an 80G hard drive. There is one "Filesystem" that contains the Ubuntu files (14G). There is another "43GB Filesystem" that contains all the Windows XP programs. Apparently most of the loading was completed but the installer hung up at step 5. How do I get it to finish?

Thanks for the above replies.

Mike

When you boot what all options do you get ? Are you getting Ubuntu loader options ? If not repeat the installation again and DELETE the partition on which ubuntu is installed and then create another one by giving the size (80GB - window space+swp).
Format the new partition and create the mount point.

One suggestion is that if you are installing Ubuntu or any flavour of Linux, Please Experiment !! :)

Arjun

     Ubuntu wasn't installed but the hard drive was divided in half. One half was windows, the other half was "unallocated". I downloaded a fresh ISO and created another CD (mine checked OK but it locked up the pc in the CD drive but worked fine in the DVD drive so I figured I'd try a fresh one).

     The new CD worked OK and I selected to install Ubuntu to the empty (unallocated) space. Everything worked OK. Then I tried to edit the Grub bootloader. I don't have a terminal in the accessories so I can't get to a command line. Then I tried to use the computer janitor and it asked me for a password. I hadn't entered one during setup as I was using automatic login. I left it blank and it told me the password was incorrect.

     I went to the recovery screen and changed my password to an actual password and rebooted. I still have no terminal and now I can log in to the janitor but I get an error message that says "Essential package dash is missing. There may be problems with apt sources.list or Packages files may be missing."

     How can I load the missing files?

Thanks

Mike

The 1st problems solved. I'll post this as a new one.