installing Linux in laptop

[Sergio Monteiro]

Hi there 

I wonder if Linux still meets..  anyone could help me to install Linux on a laptop that currently has win 7, which I would like to keep?  I would like to have a dual boot.  The hard drive is some 400Gby, win 7 plus programs uses 80, I resized this partition to 150 Gby, there is an unallocated partition of some 200 Gby in which I cannot install Linux from a USB bootable with XUbuntu install because I did not succeed in formatting this partition and creating a 1) home, 2) swap and 3) root. 

I cannot proceed because gparted says that it cannot format another primary partition because there are already 4 primary partitions.  I unmounted all others and still cannot format.

Thanks,

Sergio

[Douglas Dunn]

The problem is that the disk's MBR (master boot record, a list of partitions on the disc) will only support up to 4 partitions.

It looks like xubuntu wants to use 3 partitions, and win7 uses 2, so that's too many - you could look to see if the installer has an option like "don't use separate home/root partitions", this seems like the easiest solution to me.

You can also see if you can install xubuntu using LVM, which I know is pretty straightforward with Ubuntu, probably xubuntu as well. This basically makes one of your 4 partitions a "directory" for storing other partitions, so you can have more total.

Another strategy is to try to change your partitioning scheme to GPT, but I am not sure if windows 7 would work with that.

By the way, mounting/unmounting is not the same operation as writing or deleting partitions. 

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[Eli Stone]

Modern Ubuntu should by default only create 1-2 partitions, as it uses a swap file instead of a swap partition. Swap files are for all intents and purposes functionally the same but do not consume a partition and are easier to resize later on. My suggestion is to delete any previously created but unused partitions, and then run the installer again, being sure that you are installing at least 18.04 or newer. If it continues complaining choose manual in the partitioning section and create only the partitions you need.