Dual-Booting Ubuntu, Part 3: Installing

Sorry this post is so late – I’ve been having too much fun playing around with all the features in Ubuntu Linux 7.10. Installation was uneventful. The installer (live cd application) hung once because I entered a user name with a space in it, but I fixed that and it worked. Ubuntu is great – very fast, lots of cool games, and the graphics are even better than what I’ve seen on Windows Vista. The only drawback is boot time – 1:25, or One Minute and Twenty Five Seconds. Oh well, I always hibernate anyway.

Dual-Booting Ubuntu, Part 2: Partitioning

As I mentioned in Part 1, I needed to shrink my Windows partition before I could install Ubuntu. Before partitioning, I had one 40GB NTFS partition with Windows XP Pro and all my data on it. I wanted to shrink this partition by about 10GB so I could install Ubuntu in the remaining space.

I booted up my Ubuntu Live CD (takes forever and a day to boot from CD) and launched GParted, the GNOME Partition Editor. I chose to shrink the partition by 10GB, leaving slightly more than 10GB free space remaining.

Having already backed up my data, I clicked “Apply.” Gparted worked for a couple of minutes and then gave the ominous message “Could not complete the specified tasks” or something like that, with a big red error logo. But when I checked the disk in Ubuntu’s explorer, whatever it’s called, it said that the partition had worked.

I rebooted into Windows, expecting ChkDsk to launch. But it didn’t. All I saw was ~1/2 second of the Windows boot screen, and then blackness.

But it wasn’t silent blackness. My hard drive was making its noise. (I should really make a recording of it; it would be no harder to do so than to launch Audacity and make a recording with my laptop’s mic.) I waited for about five minutes. The hard drive was still laboring along.

So I went and had supper. When I came back, I saw the Windows welcome screen. I guess the black screen was the typical “Windows User Experience”. Logging on to Windows, I saw that the drive had correctly been resized to 27.25GB.

Dual-Booting Ubuntu, Part 1: Defragmenting

Recently I made the decision to dual-boot Ubuntu Linux 7.10 with Windows XP Pro on my laptop. To do so, I needed to shrink my Windows partition so that I would have enough free space to install Ubuntu. There was plenty of space on my hard drive – it was a 40GB drive less than half full. However, it was extremely fragmented.

Oh well, I thought, I’ll just do a defrag. I launched Windows Disk Defragmenter and defragged the disk. When it was finished, the disk was entirely defragmented; however, there were still lots of files near the end of the disk.

Hm. I tried defragmenting a second, third, fourth, and fifth time, but nothing changed. I searched the help file, but it wasn’t very helpful. What was I to do?

I googled “disk defragmenter” and, to my surprise, there were numerous free defrag utilities available online. I chose JkDefrag. It labored along for a couple of hours and then told me it was finished. I still saw a red dot right near the end of the disk – oops, that’s my dead pixel.

(JkDefrag in action. Screenshot shamelessly robbed from the JkDefrag site.) 

I launched Disk Defragmenter again, which, to my surprise, told me that the disk had a few files with fragments on it. Obviously,  although JkDefrag does a better job of moving files to the front of the disk, Disk Defragmenter defragments them better.