[ale] GParted & unallocated space

[justin caratzas]

I've seen people advocate with either choice for shrinking the windows
partition.  I just went through a similar situation where I wanted to
keep the Windows installation on a new laptop (Civ 5 ftw) and install
Archlinux to occupy half of the hard drive.  Unfortunately for me, the
archlinux installer didn't like the partition that windows had setup
as a result of the shrinking, something about cylinder boundaries and
such.  GParted wasn't working either, giving a similar message when I
tried to just give archlinux the large partition to work with.  One
challenge was all the partitions that Lenovo had in place (recovery,
installation, etc).  What I ended up having to do is manually
partition the unallocated space in GParted, and only make the
archlinux installer assign mount points, and it seemed fine with that.

As far as the space being unformatted, I think I ran into that
situation and got around it by formatting the partition as NTFS in
windows, and then simply reformatting once GParted was able to see it
upon reboot.

-- justin

On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 10:14 AM, Damon L. Chesser <damon at damtek.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 2010-09-25 at 09:58 -0400, Jim Philips wrote:
>> I bought a new laptop and I'm trying to install Ubuntu on it. The firs
>> time around, I ended up destroying the Windows installation (which I
>> did not want to do). The second time I went in and looked for the
>> "side by side" option for installing from the live CD. It wasn't
>> there. So, I decided to try GParted. I shrank the nearly 475 gigs
>> dedicated to Windows in half. After that, I am left with 235 gigs of
>> unallocated space. The Ubuntu installer will neither format nor
>> install to that space. Gparted won't format it either. So, from where
>> I am now, there is nothing I can do with that space either with the
>> Ubuntu installer or GParted. The "Format to" option is just grayed out
>> in GParted. I don't remember my last install being this hard.
>>
>> This is a Windows 7, 64 bit laptop.
>
> It is desirable to "shrink" the partition from with-in windows.  Right
> click on "my computer" select "manage" go down to "disk manager".  I
> don't remember the exact thing to do, but from there (perhaps by right
> clicking menu on the disk partition?) you can select to change the size
> of the partition.  Give that a try.  I have never "seen" the situation
> you are describing, however, I have broke windows 7 by NOT using windows
> built in disk manager to change the size.
>
> HTH
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> --
> Damon
> damon at damtek.com
>
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