Having difficulties in understanding the installation proces

[Tony_H_Bennett]

Hi sorry if I have not understood the information for installing Mint as a dual boot, but just bare with me as I live on over 300mg of morphine a day. It does fuddle the brain cells. I have allocated 62GB on a separate Partition to Win7. I have downloaded Mint 64bit s my system is a 64bit. I have tried loading Mint onto the 62GB without success. It seems to want to take all of the hard drive beyond the 62GB's. How can I get around this as I know the system has to be allocated into sections like SWAP and EXT 2 or 3. Was hoping to have set it up tonight but I am far too gone now and would like my hand holding as to how to allocate the partitions to the 62GB. In time if it works well I might even take off Windows but not sure if everything will work as I have occasionally used Linux before and found problems with printers, Skype etc. Looking forward to hearing from you and thank you for reading this and sorry my brain isn't functioning. Thank you for your understanding
Tony

[oldbeginner]

Tony

Try following these step by step instructions.

It may be that you are not choosing the free space and adding the new partition from that.


http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=122276

[TheDynamicHamza21]

when installing what are you choosing Install Linux along Windows or Erase Disk and Install Linux?

http://blog.sudobits.com/wp-content/upl ... n-type.jpg

You should choose install along side Windows or Something Else and create a two partitions: one for / and one for swap. Swap should be 2 times the size of your ram and the rest will be for your system files. Be sure to back any data before attempting to install,it's relative safe but you never know sometimes things never work as planned.

[Tony_H_Bennett]

I slowly followed the instructions and I mean carefully. I can't just select the easy route by putting mint at the side of Windows as there is NO room. I am constantly moving and deleting to have space. So that is a no go and I have allocated space from another partition. I carefully allocated the correct spaces and partitions as directed and it seemed to load fine. When I had finished allocating I went to the last box and chose Win7 disk1 then installed. Only trouble is is that the dual boot never materialised; only Windows came up when I rebooted. So have I missed a process?

[srq2625]

Here's how I would approach this situation:

1. Booting into Win7, determine how much space is used by the O/S and the user data, combined. In other words, how much of the disk is used and how much free space you have.
2. Boot the computer using the LiveCD/LiveUSB.
3. Start the install process.
4. You will quickly get to the part where the install process needs to know if you want to (paraphrasing now):
   1. Let Linux Mint take over the whole disk
   2. Install Linux Mint along side Win7
   3. Something else
5. Choose either "Install Along Side" or "Something Else"
   1. Along Side
      1. The install process will, I *think* want to know how much space to reserve for Win7.
      2. Referring back to Step 1, determine the amount of space currently used. Add some for growth. Add some more. Enter that.
   2. Something Else
      1. Determine amount of space you will need for your Win7 partition
      2. In the partitioning step (BTW, this uses gparted - nice utility), change your Win7 partition to the size required. This should provide you with a block of unallocated space.
      3. In successive steps, select that unallocated block and add a new partitions:
         • /boot - 500MB should be plenty
         • swap - 2GB should be plenty, unless you have LOTS of RAM, in which case you can make this smaller
         • / - 30GB to 50GB, depending an on the amount of space required for applications
         • /home - everything that's left - Remember, this is where your user data will be stored.
6. It should be smooth sailing at this point.
7. When the process tells you to, remove the boot media and re-boot the computer.

[Tony_H_Bennett]

Thanks I actually did it. But not without destroying the windows boot first, but realising what I had done wrong and setup a Linux boot I re-did the linux installation and it worked fine. But inbetween I was sweating to think I had to re-install windows and the Win7 disk couldn't fix mbr!

[usbtux]

How to dualboot Windows and Linux using a simple install. This is a simple standard install. http://youtu.be/lzXZpEWTApc

How to dualboot Windows and Linux using a manual install This is manual install. http://youtu.be/GlEVQqFtcuM

[Photon]

Thank you all for your assistance. I have managed to deal with my morphined stupidity!!!! I tell you, taking 300mg of morphine a day screws your brains up I can tell you. I was allocating sda1 Win7 ias the boot when I should have allocated /dev/sda Hitachi. Now up and running. Although I expect I shall be running into more trouble soon. Thank you again for your assistance

Tony