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Thus is a picture of both of my hard-drives:

image

My C Drive and my D drive. I want to put Ubuntu onto my D Drive. Now my question here is if i do install onto my D Drive then how should I do it in order to retain use of the drive. I intend to partition about 60 gigs from it. Now after doing that I should still have about 830 gigs left. I want to still be able to use that in Windows. So how and will I be able to retain use of the drive after Installing? I have installed once before and I believe i did it wrong because not only could Windows not recognize my D drive but I also lost all the data on it.

My computer is a Lenovo Y700 It is a UEFI (I believe i got that right).

David Foerster
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su2583
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1 Answers1

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If Windows is installed at your "C" drive, and your "D" drive is empty. Just partition the "D" drive, make a 60 GB partition at the end of the disk or at the beginning, and make a partition for the free space too.

You can do so via GParted tool from an Ubuntu live USB/CD.

If the 60GB partition end at the beginning of the disk, Ubuntu will be the new "D" drive, and the free space partition will be now "E" whenever you are back at Windows.

Pay attention when partitioning because normally Windows can only be installed on MBR partition tables, Linux however can be installed on GPT and MBR partition tables. Both W. and Linux can use both types of partition tables to write and read data.

When partitioning, after choosing the partition table, pick EXT4 for Ubuntu partition and NTFS for the free space partition.

Something like this:

However if your "D" drive isn't empty and you would like to preserve the files already present on it, you must leave the partition table format as is and just shrink the present partition to make enough space for a new partition. You can do so via GParted too.

eridani
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  • Would I have to use gparted or could I also use Windows "Create and build hardware Partitions?" – su2583 Mar 15 '16 at 11:17
  • Yo should try, it may be possible. Worst case scenario it won't let you format on anything different than NTFS or FAT which is acceptable. – eridani Mar 15 '16 at 13:54