Hello Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn!!!......Well maybe not

[modmidget]

In my earlier thread I was saying how great Ubuntu was and how I installed it on a spare PC in my office in less than 30 minutes. Well, it seems that isn't an accurate statement in all cases. I installed a new 100 gig drive in my home PC and loaded Windows XP. Everything worked fine. Then I attempted to install Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn and things did not go well at all....... It's a 7 step process to install Ubuntu and the first three were very slow, probably took more than 30 minutes. And then we got to step 4. The screen said "Prepare Disk Space, how do you want to partition the disk?" (it didn't give me an option to click on at this point), then a second window opened that said "Starting up the partitioner". There was a progress bar just below that and it jumped to 25% in about 15 minutes. About 2 hours later it was all the way up to 33%. Four hours later it was at 56% and I went to bed. This moring when I got up I finally was able to click on an option for "how do you want to partition the disk?". I clicked on "automatic" and left for work. I came home 2 hours later and the SOB was locked up solid, no disk activity, no cd-rom activity, nothing. So I let it set for 3 hours while I went to an appointment. Came home and it was still locked up so I hit the reset button on the front of the PC and restarted the install. Here I am 3 1/2 hours later and the damn thing was at the 33% in the "Starting up the partitioner" window.

Maybe Ubuntu isn't the way to go if your gonna spend 18 hours on the install just to watch it roll over and die.

[renegade600]

did you defrag the drive? I ran into the same problem the first time I tried to install Ubuntu to dual boot with XP. After about 6 hours of waiting during the partitioning process I gave up and canceled.

I decided to defrag the drive (with forum help) and tried again. It worked a whole lot better the second time.

[smurfy]

mm, it would be interesting to know how it reacts if XP isn't on there to begin with.
Is it a 100Gig problem or is it a XP using the space problem?

Did you install XP on the entire drive space and now expect Ubuntu to resize XPs NTFS partition to make room for Ubuntu - in that case, a defrag is essential, even on a fresh Windows install.
I've never relied on Linux to resize a Winows partition.

[modmidget]

I didn't defrag the drive because I installed XP and then started the Ubuntu install a few minutes later but I will do a defrag tonight and try again tomorrow.

I installed XP on a FAT32 partition because I really dislike NTFS.

Will start the defrag right now and see how things work in the morning. Thanks much for the replies, will let you know how it goes

By the way, I did tell XP to use the entire disk when I installed it.

[vivekaanand]

Frankly, I was quite surprised to read your post because I have installed and uninstalled feisty and edgy at least two dozen times in many different scenarios with a dual boot of linux to linux and xp to feisty and or edgy fit and vista and feisty or edgy and never ran into that situation. I have a 160 gig sata hard drive and the install from inserting the live disk to finish was max 20 min. I just decided today to reinstall xp pro and right after installed ubuntu and no problems. No defrag, nothing. I must confess though that I did have my hard drive already split in 2. Did that at the very start of when I first decided to get rid of the dell factory install, norton ghost etc etc. and install xp fresh. New then I was going to want to play with linux. I have found ubuntu to be the smoothest install out of a dozen or so that I've played with in the last couple of months. Although I started out 160 gig split into 2 clean new partitions so its different somewhat to your install.

[renegade600]

Originally Posted by vivekaanand

Frankly, I was quite surprised to read your post because I have installed and uninstalled feisty a

its just like any other software, there are those who never have problems and there are those who do. It could be because of inexperience or because there is something in their system that can cause problems. So never be surprise when someone elses experience is different than yours.

[vivekaanand]

Yeah, I've been so engrossed in my own experience its good to stick your head up a little bit higher and get out of the box once and a while. Thanks for the advice and good words of wisdom renegade600.

[smurfy]

The difference is clearly relying on the Linux partitioning tool to resize a Windows partition in order to free up space for the Linux partitions.

Set your disk up right to start with, and you shouldn't see this problem.

Install Windows to the full disk size and you probably WILL see this issue.

[modmidget]

Day 4 and still no luck.

I defragged the drive but that didn't help. Yesterday I ran Partition Magic and reduced the XP partition to 65 gig, leaving 35 gig of free space for Ubuntu. Then I restarted the install. Got to step 4 ("Prepare Partitions") and the damned thing keeps running me in circles. Every time I reply to a message on the screen it starts another disk scan. These scans can take anywhere from 20 minutes to 3 hours.

This morning I've got to the point where "Prepare Partitions" clearly shows 2 partitions. One partition is the 65 gig Windows partition and the other says "/dev/hda2 ext3 36 gig", but when I click on Finish I get a message that says "No root file system is defined. Please correct this from the partitioning menu". I click on OK and it starts yet another scan disk. There is also another message in the lower left of the screen that says "You need to specify a partition for the root file system (mount point "/") with a minimum size of 2 gig and a swap partition of at least 256 mb." So, how do I go about doing that? I don't have the foggiest idea what they are talking about.

I installed Ubuntu on a clean 40 gig drive last week and it took less than 30 minutes, but now I'm trying to install on a 100 gig drive with XP and I've wasted 4 day. This is really getting discouraging.

*edit*

Forgot to mention, I tried to run qparted from the Ubuntu CD and qtparted for a Knoppix CD but both failed. It kinda looked like qtparted couldn't find the hard drive and was trying to partition the CD.......... When I tried to run qparted from the Ubuntu CD the partitioning window opened but everything was greyed out and there was no hard drive displayed.

[vivekaanand]

If I may add a suggestion - I found that when I used gparted from the ubuntu live cd there was always some issue with mounting and unmounting the hard drive so I downloaded and burned gparted with which I can boot into and then there is no more mounting and unmounting problems. You may find better luck this way. you can download it

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php

[modmidget]

I'm up and running on Ubuntu!!!!!

Seems there were a few problems I had to work out. First of all I had to figure out how to run the Ubuntu partitioner. I was doing it all wrong but after several failed attempts I discovered my "oversights". Once I got the root partition and swap partition created the installation continued to step 5, 6, and 7. #7 is the actual installation process and the damn thing froze at 15% done, so it was back to the drawing board. I took a look inside my PC and discovered I only had 256mb of DDR RAM, so I drove out to Staples to see if they had bigger RAM. They had a PNY 1gig DDR3200 memory stick on sale for $69.00, so I bought it. Brought it home, installed it and started the Ubuntu installation again. This time it took just over 30 minutes to do the entire install. Disk scans that were taking up to 2 hours with 256 meg of memory only took 1 to 2 minutes with 1 gig. What a difference. I think renegade600 got it right when he said "inexperience". That and the shortage of RAM were the two major factors.

Thanks for all the help and input everyone. It's good to know I have a place like this to come to when I need help.

Hey, I just realized that I didn't get a couple of error message on my last install that I had gotten on all of my failed attempts. In my first attempts I got messages about "mixerapplet" & "trashapplet" and I had to select Delete in order to get the install to continue.