Most of the laptop brands you purchase comes with only a single partition(or only with C drive) and few partions like Recovery, which is not for our use. Most people think of Partition Magic softwares or Boot CDs. Your choice are right but you cannot be sure, whether the preinstalled Vista will be safe. Most case, your partitioning ends in total formatting of the harddrive. Is there any way to partition the laptops, without formatting or removing vista or recovery. The answer is here.

Put the Ubuntu Live CD in the CD drive and boot in the Live cd mode. Goto Bios settings, change boot priority to cd drive, and put the cd in drive save and restart. In the live cd mode, use the menu System->Administrator->PartionEditor(Gparted) or in the terminal $sudo gparted to open the GParted software.

In a system there can be only 4 Primary partions and each Primary partions have few good number of Secondary partions. In the Gparted software you will get a good picture of your harddrive. Locate the C Drive in the list, Right Click and select Resize/Move. Now you can find the used portion of the C Drive being yellow shaded. Click and drag your left end pointer as you wish to allocate your C Drive. (Not less than the used portion). Now the C Drive will be reduced leaving a free memory. Now right click and select New option.

If you have already, three primary partions, create the fouth partion as extended to have some partition as you require as extended. Have look at the picture you will get a clear picture. Since for installing Linux, you wil require swap, home partion, etc and so only four primary partions will not be enough.

Rosario Applications, Ubuntu Laptops, Ubuntu