Linux Mint Forums

by **Derek5272** on Sun Jul 29, 2007 11:49 pm

So, after spending the whole day trying to get my wireless drivers installed, I finally got that to work (with help from another user in my other topic), but WPA wasn't showing up in my list. I see from one of the Stickies that there's a way to fix this, but it requires a reboot. So I decided to finally partition my drive and install Mint.

However, when I ran the install program and got to the partitioning, and told it how big to make the partition, it brought up a progress bar that sat at 0% for an extended period of time... 10-15 minutes. It then proceeded to notify me that the partition resize had failed, and just brought up a screen to do a manual partition - Which confuses the hell out of me, being the newbie I am.

I have a Seagate Barracuda 160 GB 7200 RPM SATA hard drive. Currently, it's on a single partition of ~160 GB, on which I have Windows and all my data, and another 8 MB that the partition manager has listed as "Free space."

Is there a way to get the automatic partition to work for me? Or do I have to manually divvy up the existing partition? If so, is there a way to do this without losing any of the data?

by **nelamvr6** on Mon Jul 30, 2007 12:28 am

Derek5272 wrote:So, after spending the whole day trying to get my wireless drivers installed, I finally got that to work (with help from another user in my other topic), but WPA wasn't showing up in my list. I see from one of the Stickies that there's a way to fix this, but it requires a reboot. So I decided to finally partition my drive and install Mint.

However, when I ran the install program and got to the partitioning, and told it how big to make the partition, it brought up a progress bar that sat at 0% for an extended period of time... 10-15 minutes. It then proceeded to notify me that the partition resize had failed, and just brought up a screen to do a manual partition - Which confuses the hell out of me, being the newbie I am.

I have a Seagate Barracuda 160 GB 7200 RPM SATA hard drive. Currently, it's on a single partition of ~160 GB, on which I have Windows and all my data, and another 8 MB that the partition manager has listed as "Free space."

Is there a way to get the automatic partition to work for me? Or do I have to manually divvy up the existing partition? If so, is there a way to do this without losing any of the data?

Just try re-booting with the live cd, and then double click on the "Install" icon on the desktop, essentially try again.

by **newW2** on Mon Jul 30, 2007 1:01 am

Welcome to Mint, Derek5272.
If you haven't seen this how to it may help.
http://linuxgazette.net/136/lazar.html
It is dual boot for Linux Mint and XP, but should work for Vista as well. Unless you have allot of data it seems curious that partition manager indicates on 8MB free.

by **nelamvr6** on Mon Jul 30, 2007 1:34 am

newW2 wrote:Welcome to Mint, Derek5272.
If you haven't seen this how to it may help.
http://linuxgazette.net/136/lazar.html
It is dual boot for Linux Mint and XP, but should work for Vista as well. Unless you have allot of data it seems curious that partition manager indicates on 8MB free.

I believe that is the drive's cache appearing as a separate partition.

by **scorp123** on Mon Jul 30, 2007 3:04 am

Derek5272 wrote: and another 8 MB that the partition manager has listed as "Free space."

this is normal. I have that too.

by **Derek5272** on Mon Jul 30, 2007 8:40 pm

Ok, thanks guys.

So would I be correct in assuming that I should be able to take 20 gigs or something off the end of the Windows partition to make a new partition for Mint, without it affecting my existing data?

by **gollum1971** on Mon Jul 30, 2007 9:55 pm

Hi Derek.

Before you try and dual boot, its recommended to defrag Windo$e and run scan disk, just to make sure you don't lose any Windose data.

Good luck and soon you'll be converted !

AIden

by **Derek5272** on Mon Jul 30, 2007 9:59 pm

Didn't run Scandisk, but I did defrag it... Left one chunk way out from the rest, but still have about a quarter of the drive continuous after that.

by **Derek5272** on Mon Jul 30, 2007 11:35 pm

This post coming to you from Linux Mint! Hoorah! Finally working. Thanks for all the help guys! Thing is, it looks like when I told it I wanted a partition of 42 gigs, it decided to make the Windows partition that size, and give the rest to Linux? Because when I browse the computer, it has "42 GB Volume" containing my Windows files.

by **gollum1971** on Tue Jul 31, 2007 7:14 pm

Excellent news Derek.

42 Gig for Windose XP, should be fine, just don't fill it up with dvd's and such.
If your runnig Vista, you really should turn off the system restore program as that will easily use up 40 Gig.

Anyways I'll give ya a couple of weeks using Mint and I reckon you'll ditch Windose for a full install !!!!!!!!!!

Welcome and have fun

Aiden

by **nelamvr6** on Tue Jul 31, 2007 9:13 pm

Congrats Derek!

Man, I was feeling horrible that you were having such difficulties after I told you it would be so easy!

So, you got all your networking difficulties fixed too?

by **Derek5272** on Wed Aug 01, 2007 12:27 am

42 gigs for XP is not NEARLY enough for me... I already had 27 gigs of music on it, plus some videos, and I put DVD's on there quite frequently. After the partitioning, I have less than 2 GB of free space.

And the networking difficulties are mostly fixed... But it drops the connection about every 5-10 minutes, and takes anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes to reconnect when it does so.

And I can't for the life of me get Beryl to work. Just get a white screen when I run it and have to ctrl+alt+backspace and re-log. No idea what I'm doing with it to change the settings. I saw stuff in the how-to in here about "Force nVidia" but it looked like everything they were saying was clicking on the Beryl icon on the tray, which I can't get. Any other way to do that, that I may be able to actually do?

I also hate the IM program that came with it, but couldn't get the setup file to run when I tried to download a different one? Maybe I need to try telling it to run the program from a terminal rather than the file browser?

I'm going to wipe Mint here and re-partition so it doesn't have 70% of the hard drive. Currently in Windows. :-/ Linux experiences never work out well for me!

by **Derek5272** on Wed Aug 01, 2007 1:18 am

Linux has officially anally raped my hard drive. I succeeded in removing it from the disk and resizing the Windows partition to the full amount, but then when I tried to boot up the computer, it couldn't load GRUB to manage the dual booting (even though there was only Windows there) and it stopped there. So I had to reinstall Mint in order to boot Windows again.

by **nelamvr6** on Wed Aug 01, 2007 7:24 am

Derek5272 wrote:Linux has officially anally raped my hard drive. I succeeded in removing it from the disk and resizing the Windows partition to the full amount, but then when I tried to boot up the computer, it couldn't load GRUB to manage the dual booting (even though there was only Windows there) and it stopped there. So I had to reinstall Mint in order to boot Windows again.

There's a way to remove GRUB if you want to, you just boot with a windows disc that has fdisk on it and then at the a:> prompt type "fdisk /mbr" .

But don't do that while you're still working on Mint.

All of the problems you desrcrime with Beryl have been addressed in threads here. But you're probably better off getting the basics fixed before you mess with Beryl.

Do you have an nVidia graphics card?

by **Derek5272** on Wed Aug 01, 2007 3:10 pm

Yes, I have an nVidia graphics card. e-GeForce 7600 GT.

I'm just going to clear Mint again and get rid of GRUB. I can't see Mint possibly being worth all this trouble.

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