partition help

[oldgeek]

I suspect the swap partitions are being auto-mounted and one of them was #9 if I recall correctly. Reboot to the liveUSB, when you get to the desktop open a konsole terminal and type:

sudo swapoff -a

Then type:

mount

and verify nothing from the hard drive is mounted. You should be able to delete them now. If you're using KDE Partition Manager all partitions that are mounted should have a locked padlock icon displayed on them.

I tried all this, and it worked, I think. I was able to delete all four partitions, and ended up with free space of roughly 22 gb, enough to install 12.10. So I ran the installation program, did a manual partition of the partition free space, which became partition 6. So far, so good. But when I indicated that I wanted to install 12.10 to part. 6, it said I needed a swap disk partition. Unfortunately, I had erased both, so I don't remember how much space to allot to the swap, nor even how to set it up. Anyway, thinking I could resolve the problem later, I asked the computer to install 12.10 without a swap disk, and shortly afterwards the installation crashed. Now I can get nothing on my computer except GRUB errors. I presume this can be easily fixed using the live usb but I need a little guidance on how to set up the swap so that I can finish the installation. And thanks for all your help--you once helped me on a previous problem with mscorefonts, so I'm ready for your advice.

[james147]

I tried all this, and it worked, I think. I was able to delete all four partitions, and ended up with free space of roughly 22 gb, enough to install 12.10. So I ran the installation program, did a manual partition of the partition free space, which became partition 6. So far, so good. But when I indicated that I wanted to install 12.10 to part. 6, it said I needed a swap disk partition. Unfortunately, I had erased both, so I don't remember how much space to allot to the swap, nor even how to set it up. Anyway, thinking I could resolve the problem later, I asked the computer to install 12.10 without a swap disk, and shortly afterwards the installation crashed. Now I can get nothing on my computer except GRUB errors. I presume this can be easily fixed using the live usb but I need a little guidance on how to set up the swap so that I can finish the installation. And thanks for all your help--you once helped me on a previous problem with mscorefonts, so I'm ready for your advice.

Hmm, how much ram do you have? You should not need swap space to be able to install the os, nor to run it in most cases. The grub errors should be fixed once the install finishes, but you are going to need to start that process again.

You can get away with 1GB of swap or less if you already have plenty of ram (2GB+) and do not plan to hibernate (aka suspend to disk).

If you have much less then 1GB of ram then you might want more swap... but your best option really is to just buy more ram

If you plan to hibernate then you need as much swap space and the total memory usage of all your running application at the time you suspend. Most people do 1-1.5x the amount of ram they have in this case (2-4GB should be enough for typical usage).

Creating swap is easy, just create a new partition and set its file system to swap (instead of ext4). Alternatively you can create a swap file after you have installed which acts just like a swap partition except that it is easier to resize if needed.

[oldgeek]

Success--I've been able to install Kubuntu 12.10 on my Lenovo netbook and have learned a lot about partitioning hard disks in the process. I used kde partition manager throughout to delete partitions, and followed the advice given in several posts to get it right. The installation problem was due to a faulty usb pendrive or in the iso image itself. I solved that problem by downloading the iso file again, but from a mirror site (Kent Univ, England) and copying it onto a different usb. This time I did a sumcheck. The program installed without a hitch. However, the previous bincomplete installation left a partition about 8 gb in size, so I deleted both partitions and am re-installing 12.10 onto a larger partition created from the free space left by my previous deletions. Thanks to all who have contributed to this thread--the advice given was crucial and easy to follow.