I bought a new laptop, a HP Pavillion g6 with windows 7 pre-installed.
I want to create a dual-boot with OpenSuse 12.1.
There are four partitions on the harddisk. In windows I shrinked the biggest partion to create 200 GB empty space.
Here is the actual list of partitions:
/dev/sda 465 GB
/dev/sda1 199 MB NTFS SYSTEM
/dev/sda2 234 GB NTFS <- this partion was 434 GB before shrinking, it’s where windows 7 is installed
/dev/sda3 20 GB NTFS RECOVERY
/dev/sda4 4 GB FAT32 HP_TOOLS
The problem is that the OpenSuse installation dvd says that it can not create a new partition.
I don’t want to delete any of the pre-installed partitions because they contain recovery-data for windows and tools from HP.
On 06/26/2012 03:56 PM, Teuniz wrote:
>
> Hello all,
>
> I bought a new laptop, a HP Pavillion g6 with windows 7 pre-installed.
>
> I want to create a dual-boot with OpenSuse 12.1.
> There are four partitions on the harddisk. In windows I shrinked the
> biggest partion to create 200 GB empty space.
> Here is the actual list of partitions:
>
> /dev/sda 465 GB
> /dev/sda1 199 MB NTFS SYSTEM
> /dev/sda2 234 GB NTFS <- this partion was 434
> GB before shrinking, it’s where windows 7 is installed
> /dev/sda3 20 GB NTFS RECOVERY
> /dev/sda4 4 GB FAT32 HP_TOOLS
>
> The problem is that the OpenSuse installation dvd says that it can not
> create a new partition.
> I don’t want to delete any of the pre-installed partitions because they
> contain recovery-data for windows and tools from HP.
>
> How do I solve this problem?
Given your hard drive setup and your parameters, you cannot. A given hard driver
can have ONLY 4 primary partitions named /dev/sda1 - /dev/sda4. The only way
to add any more partitions will be to delete on of those 4 and create an
extended partition, which is a container, in its place. That one can handle any
number of partitions within it. Of course, you need to locate the extended
partition where the free space is.
You do realize that the RECOVERY partition would restore your machine back to
the state it was in when HP made it, which means that using it would wire out
anything you have done with Linux.
My suggestion is that you do the following:
Download the image for a bootable CD that includes gparted, the GNU partition
manager, and burn it as a bootable CD. I use the System Rescue CD from
Once that is booted, use gparted to move /dev/sda3 into the space that you freed
from the end of /dev/sda2. You can then use partimage to backup that HP_TOOLS
partition to any USB stick or an external hard driver with 4 GB free space. Then
delete that partition, and create an extended partition in /dev/sda4 that
includes the rest of the disk. Now create a FAT32 partition in /dev/sda5, format
the partition, label it HP_TOOLS, and use partimage to restore that data. At
this point, openSUSE will be able to create the 3 partitions that it will use
for swap (/dev/sda6), / (/dev/sda7), and /home (/dev/sda8).
> The problem is that the OpenSuse installation dvd says that it can not
> create a new partition.
And it is true.
> I don’t want to delete any of the pre-installed partitions because they
> contain recovery-data for windows and tools from HP.
But you have to.
You have to delete one primary partition, substitute with an extended
partition that owns all the free space, and inside create the logical
partitions that Linux needs.
For example, image and delete the recovery partition, which is now useless
for you. Image and recreate the tools into another logical partition,
later. Use all that space for the extended.
This has been asked and answered many times. One such: