Thread: Switching to Linux

Defragging? Why would you defrag if you're about to format to install Linux? Unless that's what you meant.

Anyway, does the latest Ubuntu (8.10 I think?) support SiS 966 chipsets yet? When I tried installing several linux distros on my "off-"PC upstairs, my hard drives weren't detected and there were lots of incompatibilities due to my chipset.

not formatting, resizing

gparted needs a clean NTFS partition before it can resize it

Ie.

|------------------------------NTFS----------------------------|
becomes
|---------NTFS--------|---------EXT3---------|---swap---|



*edit*

Originally Posted by TweaK

Anyway, does the latest Ubuntu (8.10 I think?) support SiS 966 chipsets yet? When I tried installing several linux distros on my "off-"PC upstairs, my hard drives weren't detected and there were lots of incompatibilities due to my chipset.

Oh jeez, I'd think so

found this - http://www.sis.com/support/support_faqs_16.htm
says the SiS966 LAN chip is fully supported (and this is seriously old - mentions RedHat 9.0, which is 7 years old - and obsolete, RHEL has long superseded RedHat Linux)

These days, you have to look pretty hard to find something not supported in Linux

Hey Ynot, I defragged and then I did a disc check and when I booted the disc i had the option Guided- use extra space or something like that, i chose it and the partition resizing started. About an hour and a half later it said there was an error and it had to abort. it then took me to do it manually. As I don't have a goddamned idea about how to resize a partition, i just shut down my computer in disdain.

Any ideas?

Boot up into the LiveCD using the "try without changing anything" option
from here, you can use Firefox, etc.

You'll see on the desktop an icon called "Install"
click this, and it'll start the install process

When you get to the partitioning, take a screenshot of the window
(press the "print screen" button on your keyboard)

Upload that somewhere, and I will have a look

Bearing in mind I don't know how the defrag / chkdsk turned out
I'm just guessing off the top of my head,
I'd say that the windows partition was reported as being bigger than it actually was (hence the installer being nervous about resizing)

After running defrag / chkdsk, the correct partition size is now set
and you have a little bit of extra space after the windows partition

This space is probably far too small for an OS install
so you'll still have to resize windows

But if you could let me have a screenshot of the partition window during install, I'll try to walk you through it

one other thing. when I ran the defrag, i went to sleep and let it run overnight, but when I checked on my computer it was just back to where i could set it to start defragging again, there was no confirmation that it did anything. is that normal?

I don't know if that's normal or not,
but if the Ubuntu installer options have changed since you did it, then chances are it did something

ok.
after it came across an error resizing the partition, i went back and was going to try it again but the option to resize and use remaining space was gone.