disk partitionning

mathieu2011

Hello a friend convinced me to try out Mandriva on my new laptop, i'm not really good with computers and was wondering if I could get some help partitioning my hard disk and installing Mandriva. I've been looking on the internet for some step by step directions but haven't found much. I'm using a lenovo w10 with windows 7 pro already installed.

Thanks for any advice

mfillpot

To install a Linux system you only need two partitions, a small swap partition and a root (/) partition. I recommend shrinking your windows partition using the windows disk management tool to allow at least 22GB of space for a Linux installation. once that it done you can setup a 2G swap partition and a 20G root partition for your installation.

mathieu2011

I've reduced the size of my windows partition, but I was wondering if I needed two primary partitions to install linux with a dual-boot systeme. I think that this would be a problem because I alredy have three primary partitions, System_DRV,Windows 7, and lenovo recovery

mfillpot

All of the windows partitions are needed to recover windows in case it fails. You will need the Linux swap partition which is like the paging file in windows that acts like backup RAM in case you have exceeded the capacity of your RAM. And you need the root partition to store all of you OS, application and user files.

If you have the complete windows recovery disk set for your computer then the recovery partitions can be removed, but most manufacturers have stopped shipping the disks with their computer to cut costs.

mathieu2011

No, I don't have the recovery disk, I was wondering if there might be another way of installing linux without using two primary partitions

Goineasy9

You don't need 2 primary partitions. Here's the fdisk from my dual boot laptop, Windows 7 and Fedora 14. I use a /boot partition, / (root) partition, a /home partition and a /swap partition.

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 63 80324 40131 de Dell Utility
/dev/sda2 80325 30800324 15360000 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 * 30800325 450236868 209718272 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda4 450237690 976768064 263265187+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 450237753 452334904 1048576 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 452334906 536220984 41943039+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 536220986 552998200 8388607+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda8 552998202 976766264 211884031+ 83 Linux

All Linux partitions are in the extended category.

saqman2060

You will need a linux primary partition to boot the linux OS. Even if you shrink the windows 7 primary partition, the remaining free space will be converted to a linux primary.

mathieu2011

I don't really understand what that means. I'd really need help understanding how I should divide my partition

mfillpot

You will not necessarily need a "primary" partition, all partitions for a linux distribution installation can be logical partitions.

corec

You could use a live cd like gparted after you freed up space in Windows to create an extended partition. Then inside that create a 2 gb logical partition for swap and format it as swap then create another one in the extended for the root and format it to whatever file-system you like, as long as its supported by which os you want to install.