Lewis Lebentz asks:
I want to play around with Windows 8, but cannot use VirtualBox because my laptop, despite being about 3 years old doesn’t support VT-x.
I was going to install it onto a new partition, but I don’t really know much about partitions.
I found out that you can only have 4 primary partitions on 1 hard drive.
At the moment I have:
10GB Recovery Partition
100MB System Reserved, Primary Partition
300GB Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition (Win7)
150GB Primary Partition (Ubuntu)
3GB Primary Partition (Linux-Swap)
How can I get rid of some partitions? Why does Ubuntu need 2 Primary partitions? Why does the 100MB partition need to be primary?
HELP! How can I clean this up to keep Windows 7 (or possible upgrade that to 8) and keep Ubuntu 12.04?
Browser: Chrome
System: Ubuntu 12.04 & Windows 7
Tagged: install operating system, manage partition, microsoft windows, partition, windows 8
System: Ubuntu 12.04 & Windows 7
Tagged: install operating system, manage partition, microsoft windows, partition, windows 8
5 Answers -
Bruce Epper
July 23, 2012The 100MB system reserved partition is used by Win7 to boot your system. If it is the only OS on the computer, it is not required but it MUST be there if your are dual-booting with any other OS and it must be a primary partition because it is where the system will find the bootloader.If you are using Win7 Pro, Enterpirse or Ultimate, you can set up Win8 to boot from a VHD file (Virtual Hard Disk) which is what I did with my system.You could image your Win7 installaton and do an upgrade installation of Win8 over it so you don’t need to mess around with your existing partitions. This would be the easiest method by far.For future reference, if you will be dual-booting Windows (any flavor) with Linux systems, you are generally better off setting up an extended partition and installing all of your Linux distros in there.
Dylan Brendan
July 27, 2012You caqn download the preview from WIndows 8 developer website and just test it out by rebooting your PC.
allan jay monteclaro
July 31, 2012The 3GB partition is used by Linux if data from the original partition “overflows”.
Igor Rizvi?
August 1, 2012just use the win8 preview installation
FIDELIS
August 20, 2012Hello, you could created an extended partition and use linux from there. You can have 4 primary partitions in windows period. It is not in one drive. Or you could have 3 primary partitions and extended one with many dynamic partitions in it. Windows base are not able to run from dynamic partitions. Ubuntu is able to.