Ready to install?

OK, so you have had a look around and are now ready to start the install process. Have you Backed up?

There are different ways of installing Linux on your PC, to name a few:

1. You are using Linux on its own and the machine has only the one hard drive in the pc (this is the best for first timers that are worried about loosing windows and data) you can also do it this way by unplugging any other drives in your machine (paranoid) so it just leaves the drive you want to erase and work with, then swapping over when you want to go to windows (really paranoid).

2. Dual Booting – one hard drive. – This installation will RE-SIZE your hard drive that contains windows and uses the remaining disc space that you select as spare for Linux. This will give you a GRUB (boot-loader) menu that will allow you to select if you want to start Ubuntu Linux or Windows on start-up. If there is anything important in Windows or on this drive, it is important that you back this up. I have never had a problem when it re-sizes the drive (but if the power goes out and you have not UPS) there is a change that it can cause a corruption and the drive will need a format.

3. Dual Booting – more than one hard drive: – this is the same as above in a sense – you will have a choice or either resizing one of the hard drives in the machine (does not have to be the windows drive) or you can actually use a “whole drive” separate form the windows drive, or a partition that you have set aside on a drive that can be erased and used for linux. This too will create a GRUB menu at startup to select the Operating system you want to load up at start up.

4. Then another favorite for beginners of Linux – is to install withing windows (yuck) a copy of Vmware server : Freely down-loadable from vmare.com – a free registration to get the install key for it (free of charge). Installing this software will allow you to install a VIRTUAL PC of Linux inside / on top of, the windows operating system. This will reserve a selection of disc space (8gig if you accept defaults). This is another very safe way to give the Ubuntu Linux system a good testing without taking a chance of damaging your systems data.

So you will need to decide which option is best for yourself, depending on you knowledge of PCs, hard drive structures, partitions, and a little Linux know how. I would like to give you a brief explanation of how the hard drive are seen and the name given within Linux so that it helps with your install, you can reference back to this a little later so make a note of this:

By convention, IDE drives will be given device names /dev/hda to /dev/hdd. Hard Drive A (/dev/hda) is the first drive and Hard Drive C (/dev/hdc) is the third. This applies to IDE hard drives not SATA or SCSI drives!. So if you had say a 80gig hard drive on its own and it was split into to partitions of 40gig each you would have something like: /dev/hda1 and /dev/hda2 – meaning partition 1 and partition 2 or the Hard Drive A /dev/hda…… make sense? So if you had 2 hard drives in your machine they would be /dev/hda and /dev/hdb === if they each had been split into 2 partitions then: /dev/hda1 ; /dev/hda2 ; /dev/hdb1 ; /dev/hdb2 so it is straight forward. All you need to remember is Under windows which drive is the primary A and the secondary B. Here is a link to a website that shows this all in table form as well as explains things for more advanced setups like logical drives (having a few) and understanding how they would be seen. Click HERE for the Information.

Once you got your head around this then we can begin…… on new post.