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I have Windows 8.1 on C-drive and I want to install Ubuntu 14.04 on D-drive . I want to know would it be fine if I select "Ubuntu alongside windows" option and will it keep all the partitions intact?

Available partitions

C: 100 Gigs Primary partion(Boot,page file,crash dump) (windows drive)

D: 50 Gigs Logical partition

E: 50 Gigs Logical partition ( will merge into D)

F: 90 Gigs Logical partition

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Govinda Sakhare
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  • The short answer is yes it's ok to keep three partitions. The long answer is you should check for existing answers on dual booting win 8.1 and Ubuntu before proceeding. – Elder Geek Sep 30 '14 at 16:01

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Try it! Select the alongside option. The installer then will you set how much space is going to be used for Ubuntu. If it shows three partitions, you're fine. But I assume it will attempt to split up the Windows partition. If this is the case, go back and select "Something else".

Now it will ask you to set up everything manually. Do the following:

  1. Delete E: (probably sda3, I can't tell) resize D: (sda2). Leave some space the size of your RAM
  2. Create a new partition between D: and F: of the size of your RAM. E.g. If you have 8GiB of RAM, create a 8GiB partition.
  3. Format this new partition as linux-swap
  4. Format D: as ext4
  5. Select the disk, where all those partitions are on, as bootloader device (most likely /dev/sda)
  6. Apply and install.

This instructions my contain something that won't work, but it won't damage your Windows, if you don't do anything stupid. But you should still create a backup of all your important data, since partitioning can always harm the data on the affected disk.

s3lph
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  • It may be more efficient when the RAM is completely used. Except for this case, it's useless. As you only have 3GB of RAM, I'd give it a bit more, let's say 4GB. However, heavy swapping will slow your system down very much. To regulate swappiness, read this: http://askubuntu.com/questions/103915/how-do-i-configure-swappiness – s3lph Sep 30 '14 at 14:25
  • Did everything work as intended? – s3lph Sep 30 '14 at 14:25
  • thanx i gave 4 GB but i heard Linux is very fast and still my Windows 8 is faster than Ubuntu 14.04. – Govinda Sakhare Oct 01 '14 at 16:01
  • Yes, concerning the speed, Ubuntu is set up strangely. You should turn the swappiness down to about 5 and install the packages preload and prelink. This could give you a large improvement of performance. – s3lph Oct 01 '14 at 16:29