Ubuntu
ubiquity package

Reinstalling Ubuntu 11.10

Asked by Michael Franklin

I'm a newbie and happened to mess up my hard drive a bit by incorrectly using TestDisk software, but luckily I had all of my documents and everything backed up onto my external hard drive. As a side note, I also had a corrupted Windows 7 operating system that was partitioned onto the hard drive as well.

What should my next course of action be? Do i need to wipe the computer somehow? Or will reinstalling Ubuntu 11.10 effectively do that it in the process? And about the partition, will that partition be there afterward?

What I end up wanting to do is actually keeping a similar partition scheme (only changing the memory allocated to each OS; and instead of Windows 7, I'll have XP). Should I deal with the partitioning first and install each OS accordingly? Or should I install Ubuntu first, allocate hard drive space for the Windows partition, and THEN install XP afterward?

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Chris (fabricator4) said : 		#1

If you install XP after Ubuntu then it will erase the grub bootloader, requiring you to re-install grub2. If you want to keep the same partitioning that you have now, just install XP to the desired partition, then install Ubuntu to the other partition.

It's been some years since I installed XP, but I'm not sure it will be happy installing to the second hard drive.

If you want to resize or otherwise play with the partitions then boot off the LiveCD and run Gparted. This will let you move, resize, delete, and create partitions to your hearts content. If you're going to be completely re-installing anyway there's nothing stopping you from deleting the partitions and starting from scratch, and it's much faster than re-sizing partitions.

As a minimum you'll need 1 partition for XP, 1 partition for Ubuntu, and 1 swap partition for Linux of at least the size of your memory. When you start Gparted you will probably find that Ubiquity (the Ubuntu installer) has already previously made a swap partition at or near the end of the drive. If so, you can leave this where it is.

Ubiquity may have put the Ubuntu and swap partition on an extended partition that needs to be dealt with separately. An extended partition is made because the maximum number of primary partitions you can have on a physical drive is 4.

I prefer to have a primary partition for XP, then format the rest of the drive as extended and place at least 2 15 GB partitions for Ubuntu / (root) and the swap partition in the extended partition. The rest of the extended partition can then be allocated as one partition and used for Ubuntu /home.

Having a separate /home partition has benefits such as being able to share the /home between the two Ubuntu root partitions, data safety if something happens to /, and it simplifies re-install and recovery operations.

The reason I like to have at least 2 / partitions is that I can install the next release of Ubuntu (or a different flavour eg Lubuntu) and run it normally, but still have the previous release to fall back on if there is a problem or I don't like the new one. There are benefits of always having a linux partition than can be booted off no matter what.

You might want to Google different partitioning schemes and decide if you want to go with the simple scheme you've got at the moment, or go with something more robust but more complicated.

Chris

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