[wplug] Hard Drive Partitions - Windows 7 NetBook

[Greg Simkins]

Dear WPLUGers, 

I gave up on buying a suitable NetBook with ubuntu pre-installed and purchased a new Toshiba NB205-N325BL NetBook which came with Windows 7 installed.  I want to dual boot it with ubuntu, but figured that it might work differently than the Windows XP OS that ubuntu plays with rather nicely so I googled for new instructions.  I found fantastic directions at http://lifehacker.com/5403100/dual+boot-windows-7-and-ubuntu-in-perfect-harmony

These directions are very easy to follow however they assumed that my Windows installation would have only 2 primary partitions.   My Toshiba NetBook came with 3 primary partitions so I was unable to create both an ubuntu OS partition and a shared data partition. (Somewhere out there in Cyberspace, it is prohibited to have more than 4).  I have both Windows 7 and ubuntu running fine in their respective partitions.  

GParted shows the following hard drive allocations at present:

Unallocated  1.00MiB  Label:  Blank 

/dev/sda1    ntfs    Label:  System            Size:  1.46 GiB  Used: 500.25 MiB   Unused 999.75 MiB   Flags:  boot

/dev/sda2   ntfs   Label:  TI103127W0E  Size:  72.31 MiB   Used:  15.82 MiB   Unused:  56.50 MiB

Unallocated                                               Size:  4.70 MiB 

/dev/sda4  ext4   Label:  None (but I named it Ubunto in Windows)  Size:  19.53 GiB  Used 2.32 GiB  Unused 17.21 GiB  
 
/dev/sda3  ntfs  HDDRecovery               Size 7.43 GiB  Used 6.87 GiB  570.MiB  flags:  hidden
 
Unallocated   Size:  48.31 GiB  



I think I should keep the HDDRecovery partition /dev/sda3, but I am not sure why there are separate System and TI103127W0E partitions for Windows 7.  I don't think I should blow away a partition called "System".  And I assume that the big partition /dev/sda2 is also rather important.  

Does anybody know how I can create a shared data partition in the remaining 48 GB unallocated?  Can I migrate the HDDRecovery partition offline somewhere and be able to properly restore it later?  Or maybe I should just run ubuntu OS on flash media as Nick suggested at the InstallFest.  

Thanks, 

Greg
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