Problem with Ubuntu installation alongside WindowsXP

Question

I tried to install Ubuntu on my WindowsXP machine as a second OS.

I do not get the option "Install Ubuntu alongside them" when I go through the guided installation process from the Live-CD.

Any idea or help on what I could do?

Further information:

I have three primary partitions:

(without title) 78MB FAT
Recovery (D:) 10 GB NTFS
(C:) 136.47 GB NTFS
And one extended partition (as a logical drive): - Mediadirect 2.5 GB FAT 32

There is no unpartitioned disk space left

My drive is a basic drive and I ran chkdsk (no errors found) but the problem persists

I have three primary partitions:

(without title) 78MB FAT

Recovery (D:) 10 GB NTFS

(C:) 136.47 GB NTFS

And one extended partition (as a logical drive):

Mediadirect 2.5 GB FAT 32

There is no free space or unpartitioned disk space left — Tobias, Feb 12 '12 at 21:57
thanks - remember to edit your question with any replies to comments. — fossfreedom, Feb 12 '12 at 22:02
possible duplicate of Why don't I have the option ''Install Ubuntu alongside with them'' — Bruno Pereira, Feb 12 '12 at 22:23
thanks for the hint! My drive is a basic drive and I ran chkdsk as described there (no errors found) but the problem persists — Tobias, Feb 12 '12 at 22:53
... I think I have read somewhere that you must have a small amount of unallocated space available for the install alongside option to be visible... can you shrink your C: partition by 20-50GB first and rerun the install. thanks. — fossfreedom, Feb 12 '12 at 23:10
Thanks a lot fossfreedom. I am not very experienced with changing/shrinking partitions. Do you know any link where I could find an instruction on how to do that? — Tobias, Feb 12 '12 at 23:11

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 13 '12 at 00:04

1

Note that you already have 4 partitions which is the maximum amount possible in the MBR partition table, so Ubuntu can't create another primary partition.

It would be able to create another logical partition inside your extended partition, but the latter is too small to install Ubuntu there.

So Ubuntu unstaller is literally out of options here :) You need to help it by shrinking your C: drive and then moving/resizing your extended partition to make it a bit larger. In the process you can even create an ext4 logical partition for your Ubuntu manually.

As I remember Ubuntu requires somewhere between 6 and 7 Gb of disk space to install.

answered Feb 13 '12 at 00:04

Sergey

43,665

That sounds very good, thanks a lot! I still have to find out how to shrink my C: drive as I am not very experienced with doing this kind of things. – Tobias Feb 13 '12 at 09:00
Thanks a lot for your help. I managed to reduce the size of C: with gParted and have now successfully installed Ubuntu as a second OS! – Tobias Feb 13 '12 at 23:39
Glad to hear! You can mark the answer as a solution then. – Sergey Feb 14 '12 at 00:23

Problem with Ubuntu installation alongside WindowsXP

1 Answers1