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Muhammad Azeem
Asked: 2012-05-12 21:28:46 +0800 CST

How to create more partitions?

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I currently have only one partition but want to create some more partitions. How can I partition my drive using Ubuntu?

And is data formatted from documents when we upgrade Ubuntu to new release?

partitioning document-management

1 Answers

  1. You cannot change your partition while you are using that partition. The best thing is to define your partitions before installing Ubuntu with the Live CD.

    If while you are installing from the Live CD you select Something else as your choice on the Installation Type window, you can define the partitions as you please.

    You will need to format one partition as /, create a swap partition (approx equal to your amount of RAM), and, if you do not want to lose documents etc., make a separate /home partition. (This also means these files are separate if you need to reinstall to the / partition or upgrade or try a different distro - /home does not need to be formatted1).

    There are hundreds of how to's all over the internet on how to do this.

    Following is an example setup for multibooting and sharing between Windows and Linux on 300gb.

    sda1 = ntfs 50gb (Windows 7)
sda2 = extended 250gb (for the following)
sda3 = ext4 25gb  (/ for 10.04)
sda4 = ext4 25gb (/ for 12.04)
sda5 = ext4 100gb (/home shared between 10.04 and 12.04²
sda6 = fat32 or ntfs 100gb for a shared drive between all 3 OS's

    All that being said - and my preferred method - you can still use gparted from a Live CD and shrink and edit partitions with a risk of losing data. Plenty of tutorials out there on how to do that also - including some on YouTube.

    1 Some configuration files (ones that start with a ., for example .config) can botch a different install if you use the same username.

    2 (each Linux OS requires a different user name to avoid conflict.)

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