Foo - install os without reformating external harddrive

is it possible?

do you an internal hardrive to install the os on? Or are you installing on the external?

i don't want to mess with my laptop, so i would like to install it on my external, which has stuff on it, but no os

im trying to instal ubuntu, but it doesn't actually say i need a new partition.

Problem comes in when trying to boot from an external drive...

anyway what about partitioning the harddrive for my computer, without losing any data

Partition Magic™

- Wil

anything free?

Problem comes in when trying to boot from an external drive...

Should be able to, most new motherboards can boot from USB

As an alternative, you can grab VMWare or VirtualPC and run the Linux stuff under that.

As an alternative, you can grab VMWare or VirtualPC and run the Linux stuff under that.

VirtualPC will not run on any of the Vista Home Editions for your info. It nice, but get the VMWare, much better. Will run on XP or 2K

anything free?
I am not sure if this has the utility you need, but have you tried the Ultimate Boot CD?

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com

Could also look at some shareware (http://tucows.com) sites or cnet (http://cnet.com) you can often find good programs there.

VirtualPC will not run on any of the Vista Home Editions for your info. It nice, but get the VMWare, much better. Will run on XP or 2K

Yecch. Thanks for the heads up on that. I'm using the Business [1] edition of Vista on my machines, so didn't realize that the Home editions wouldn't allow you to run stuff.

[1]: I'm too lazy to upgrade to Ultimate because I'm replacing Vista with Windows 2008 Server when it gets officially released, and since none of my boxes have a TPM chip, there isn't any real benefit to using BitLocker as opposed to Jetico or PGP.

I boot into the system recovery live cd and use gparted to compress my windows partition. After that use gparted to set up a swap partition at the end of the drive (2X the size of your RAM).

http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

Gparted is a bit easier to use than the partitioner that Ubuntu employs during installation, but you still have to use Ubuntu's partitioner to set up a partition and mount point in the empty space between windows and swap.

I am not sure if this has the utility you need, but have you tried the Ultimate Boot CD?

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com

If not there, here: http://www.ubcd4win.com/ they are different.

It's also good for cleaning up extremely infested computers.

If you want more details on dual booting ubuntu, pm me. I've done it many times.