0

I ordered a PC with no OS. I just installed windows onto the 500mb SSD. I also have in there a 2 terabyte western digital red, not yet formatted. I want to install unbuntu 20.04. I want to install it along side windows on the SSD, and share the Western digital for storage partitions.

I'm not sure how to do that. Does anyone know?

(Honestly I went overboard with the storage. I don't need that much.)

user2904033
  • 121
  • 2
  • 8
  • Did you leave any space on the SSD? – Nmath Dec 12 '20 at 20:07
  • There's plenty of space on it, but I assume at this point it's all a windows partition. – user2904033 Dec 12 '20 at 20:10
  • That won't do. You need unpartitioned free space. You'll have to shrink the Windows partition, or reinstall Windows to a smaller partition. As long as you have unpartitioned free space available, the Ubuntu installer will give you a guided option to "Install alongside Windows". You might want to disconnect the 2TB – Nmath Dec 12 '20 at 20:15
  • If new system, did you correctly install in UEFI boot mode to gpt partitioned drive, not the now 40 year old BIOS/MBR configuration? Ubuntu has to be in same boot mode, but should be UEFI. Shows live installer with screen shots. Both BIOS purple accessibility screen & UEFI black grub menu screen 20.10 uses grub for both https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI Shows Windows screens https://askubuntu.com/questions/221835/installing-ubuntu-on-a-pre-installed-windows-10-with-uefi – oldfred Dec 12 '20 at 20:18
  • You don't mean a 500mb SSD. I think you meant 500 GB, I hope? I'd shrink that down to 80 GB for Win10. I would install Ubuntu on the 2TB disk. It's best to have the 2 OS on separate disks. I'd use 80 - 100 GB for Ubuntu as an ext4 partition and the rest allocated as an NTFS partition for all your data. You can shrink Windows and set up the data partition from Win 10 disk manager. – Paul Benson Dec 12 '20 at 20:35
  • ... it's not better to put any OS on a HDD when SSD is a viable option. 80GB is so small for Windows that a typical user will run out of space quickly and painfully... I'd say more like 400GB for Windows and 100 GB for Ubuntu. OPs plan to use the SSD for operating systems and software ---and HDD for other files is appropriate – Nmath Dec 12 '20 at 20:49
  • Really? I've never used more than 60 GB for Windows including Win 10, and I've barely used 50% of that space over the years. However I regularly clear browser cache and keep all data in its own dedicated partition. So cannot understand why anyone would need 100GB, let alone 400GB for Win10. – Paul Benson Dec 12 '20 at 21:32
  • @Paul Windows is known to bloat and don't forget about Windows software either. My current Windows partition has 145GB of data. All from Windows and software. This is of course depends on how much and what kind of software you intend to install. But 60GB is small enough to cause problems. OP had 500 GB of SSD space, so why would you restrict its use to nearly 10% of that? OS, software and configs should have priority of SSD space due to the dramatic improvement of random read speed. Your suggestion results in a slower and more restrictive installation – Nmath Dec 12 '20 at 22:21
  • There are a lot of people out there with Windows installed on expensive fast 120GB and smaller SSD's. Ubuntu mostly runs in RAM, from what I can see from benchmarking, a SSD mainly just helps when reading from disk or writing to disk, as long as there is enough RAM. – C.S.Cameron Dec 13 '20 at 02:52

1 Answers1

0

So I managed to do what I wanted. Unbuntu installed itself on the 2TB HDD. From inside windows I shrunk the windows partition to 200GB on the SSD. Then I deleted the 2TB partition from the unbuntu installer. Then I installed unbuntu on the 300GB cleared from the SSD. Then I went into windows and used diskmgmt.msc to claim the HDD for windows.

But now the new install of Linux has been really buggy.

user2904033
  • 121
  • 2
  • 8