Loading Kubuntu 12.04 onto a laptop

[SteveRiley]

Catching up, I'll answer and comment in order.

It appeared on screen as a Basic partition rather than extended which bothered me and I was trying to convert it from Basic to Extended - with the intent of then creating within it two more partitions

Minor terminology correction, if I may. There's no such thing as a "basic partition." The Windows-specific designations of basic or dynamic disks refer to which configuration the Windows disk manager uses to lay down partitions. Dynamic disks support volumes that span multiple physical drives; basic disks do not. (Unfortunately, there is a fair amount of sloppiness used online; even the Wikipedia article refers to "basic partition.") Outside of Windows, you won't see the basic/dynamic disk terminology. When configuring a system to boot multiple operating systems, you should use only basic disks -- it'll make your life much easier. While it's possible to manipulate volumes and partitions on dynamic disks using utilities in the dmraid package, it tends to be laborious and unpredictable.

How do you work that out, please, and why should it be so?

Look at the starting and ending sector numbers for your earlier partition scheme:

Device     Boot  Start      End        Blocks      Id  System
/dev/sda5        771973120  976771071  102398976   83  Linux
/dev/sda6        433852416  763594751  164871168   83  Linux
/dev/sda7        763596800  771971071  4187136     82  Linux swap / Solaris

These indicate the physical start and end of each partition on the disk.

I don't quite know how that 139Gig NTFS partition /sda5 got in your extended partition ?maby the installer did it?

Yeah, I was wondering that, too. I never allow the partitioner to make its own decisions, I wonder what it did here?

don't worry about what you asked in post#14 as the partitions have changed sense @SteveRiley made that comment and are now contiguous and numbered correctly

Indeed. Looks like you're all set, Keith.