installing dual operating system

Question

I have a laptop with a 500 GB hard disk and my partitions are:

1. C:\ 57.7 GB (OS installed)
2. D:\ 57.7 GB
3. E:\ 300 GB
4. F:\ 50 GB

All partitions use the NTFS file system.

Each of these 4 partitions is comprised of many minor partitions. According to disk management the 4 partitions have the following composition:

1. C:\ 57.7 GB (single partition)(healthy(system,boot,page file, crash dump))
2. D:\ 57.7 GB (single partition)(healthy)
3. E:\ 300 GB (91 MB + 101 MB + 20 GB + 37.4 GB + 100 MB + 50 GB + 97 MB + 192 GB)(healthy)
4. F:\ 50 GB (91 MB + 106 MB + 102 MB + 39.8 GB + 10 GB)(healthy)

I don't want all these small partitions, I only want the 4 main partitions. When I tried to install another OS so that I can use my laptop with dual operating systems, only the C:\ partition is compatible for OS installing, but the in C:\ partition already has an OS in installed on it.

When I tried to install an OS on one of the partitions other than C:\, it is saying that it has multiple partitions.

Please help me.

Answer 1

When I was having issues with my SSD drive the technician from Mushkin advised me to use a neat bootable linux distro known as Parted Magic. You can download it from the link below:

http://partedmagic.com/doku.php?id=downloads#.UVT931fpkik

This has a lot of disk based utilities like GParted that you can use to repartition your drives to your needs. However you should also be able to use the Disk Management MMC in Windows to combine to expand the partitions into one. Unless there is some data on it. It might be more convenient to delete all the smaller partitions then recreate it as one volume.

Ubuntu, CentOS, Mint, whatever your flavor's disk partitioning tools during installation should be able to do this during the installation of the second OS. Though be sure where you install the boot loader for the operating system. This could come to bite you later on.

Create New Partition on Windows: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/gg309170.aspx

GParted Manual: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/display-doc.php?name=help-manual

In short there are many options to get to the end result. It depends on what your primary OS is currently. Use disk management tools provided by the operating system to repartition the disks. Or if you want you can try Parted Magic. I like having Parted Magic around just for those nasty partitioning problems.

Answer 2

In general (since no OS specifics are mentioned), the new OS install that you are using appears to be assuming that the exiting partitions are in use. Typically an OS install will have an option to browse and modify the available disks partitions, freeing an current allocated partitions. If your OS install isn't allowing you this option, you can use any other partition tool to delete the partitions where you want to install (Most likely, you intent do use Partition E:). This will leave unallocated space and the other 3 partitions. Then run the OS install and point it to that unallocated space as the install destination.

A good partition tool is GParted, which you can use as a bootable CD.