Decreasing windows partition's size and increasing kubuntu partition's size

[Snowhog]

Something; an important 'somerthing'; that I haven't see mentioned in this thread (might be somewhere and I just missed it) is the maximum number of Primary partitions you can have, which is 4. Looking at the graphical report of your drive, I see 4 partitions 'in use' and an unallocated area of the drive containing 145.87 GB. Even though the Windows Disk Management utility is showing what looks like four partitions, even identifying two of them as Primary Partitions, as well as a Recovery Partition and a System Partition, we really need to know how Linux (Kubuntu) sees the drive layout, as there may be additional preparation required on the Windows side.

[oshunluvr]

Something; an important 'somerthing'; that I haven't see mentioned in this thread (might be somewhere and I just missed it) is the maximum number of Primary partitions you can have, which is 4. Looking at the graphical report of your drive, I see 4 partitions 'in use' and an unallocated area of the drive containing 145.87 GB. Even though the Windows Disk Management utility is showing what looks like four partitions, even identifying two of them as Primary Partitions, as well as a Recovery Partition and a System Partition, we really need to know how Linux (Kubuntu) sees the drive layout, as there may be additional preparation required on the Windows side.

This doesn't apply as he's using a GPT partitioned disk. See post #5 and notice 6 partitions and no Extended partition. This is not possible unless one is using GPT.

[Snowhog]

This doesn't apply as he's using a GPT partitioned disk. See post #5 and notice 6 partitions and no Extended partition. This is not possible unless one is using GPT.

Ah. Good to know. In the words of Gilda Radner's character Emily Litella, "Never Mind."

[oshunluvr]

Just in case it wouldn't be obvious, of course I don't ask you to answer to everything. But if some of you have the impression that it's more or less the way to proceed or not at all, I would be glad to hear it.

I looked a bit online and found the following answers for some of my question:

b) It looks like 20GB should be enough for the root. Some people on quora say that 10 is enough so 20 seems ok.

d) Given the fact that my memory is of the SSD type, it shouldn't influence the speed of computation.

Re. b) I think I may have said 20 was enough, if you have a separate /home. I have a whole lot of stuff installed and I am using about 17GB. You could go a bit larger, say 24-30GB if you think you'll be trying every program under the sun. Many new Linux users will install 6 of everything until they find the one they like, and you have plenty of drive space so a bit larger partition wouldn't hurt. This is a good thing because Linux is all about choice. In my case, I also have /tmp mounted in RAM rather than on the drive so I'm not using space for that. IMO, I would lean toward a higher number for you, say 24-26GB.

Re. c) You will have no trouble accessing your Windows files. It will only be a matter of choosing which way works best for you. This is better discussed after you're running Kubuntu.

Re. d) Actually, the opposite can be true. In this case, a single drive system, there will be zero difference in file access times (computational time is something entirely different). In the olden days of IDE drives, one could actually speed up file access by spreading various parts of the installation on separate drives using separate IDE channels. This is no longer needed as the interface is no longer the bottleneck.

Re. e) The answer to this depend on which tools you use to create the partitions. All the graphical tools have the option to enter a label. I tend to use descriptive ones that make sense - "root" or "kubuntu" for the install and "home" or "my_data" for home, etc.

And now for 12a, which is really about 1 through 11:

1,2,3) Minor point, but most modern computers allow a boot to a USB device without powering off or editing BIOS. Most have a key you simple hold down during reboot that invokes a temporary boot menu - Usually F8. Otherwise, yes, the BIOS will allow you to enable USB boot.

4,5,6,8) Mostly correct - as I pointed out above you may want to adjust to 20GB upward slightly.

7) The main point from that article to be taken away is HIBERNATION. If you don't actually hibernate your computer, 20GB is ridiculously large, If you "suspend" you aren't hibernating. I rarely use Linux laptops, by I'm pretty sure the default lid-close action is suspend, not hibernate. Frankly - just my biased opinion here - "Hibernate" was invented for Windows users because it takes too dang long to boot up. My Linux machine here boots from cold-start to log in in about 22 seconds and that's with 11 seconds of artificial delay because of my BIOS and grub settings. Hibernation would maybe save me 2-3 seconds. Not worth it.

9) Yes. Actually, the greeting screen has two choices - "Try Kubuntu" or "Install Kubuntu", you can install later if you choose "Try..." or just install from the get-go.

10,11) The second screen in the install menu is this:


Selecting "Manual" get you this:


From here, you click on the partition in question - obviously yours will have more than this example - and choose "Change". The menu presented will allow formatting options (which you can ignore if you've pre-formatted your partitions) and "Use as:" which lets you choose many from many options or create your own. You can see / and /home are in there;


You can ignore your other extra partitions for now, just focus on root and home. Swap, if existing prior to installation, will be automatically detected and used.

One very small comment: I always suggest to posters that precise terminology is extremely helpful when requesting help. You might try to refer to RAM as "memory" but hard drives, SSDs, USB drives, etc. as "storage". Running out of storage (for files) is entirely different than running out of RAM (memory) for processing. This word mix-up is a common occurrence, but every bit of precision can help when communicating across the internet, hours, miles, and languages.

Finally; You are not causing the least bit of trouble nor need you apologize. All of us hang out here to give and get help and we have all been in your shoes at one point or another. Welcome to Linux, Kubuntu, and of course, this Kubuntu Forum.

[oshunluvr]

Ah. Good to know. In the words of Gilda Radner's character Emily Litella, "Never Mind."

LOL, loved that character and I invoke her often.

I converted all my drives to GPT (except the btrfs ones that use the full device) 3 years ago. Nice to be away from those restrictions and limitations. But that's another topic...

[mr_raider]

Here is an example of what parted should show. And the sintaller.

The sizes are not accurate obviously. I left a chunk empty in the middle if you ever want to create the "backup partition"

[Qqmike]

And this is kind of obvious, but I'll drop it anyway:
When you set a label on a partition, like my_data, for example, you would open your partition tool (GParted, KDE Partition Manager, etc.), allow it to show you your disk, identify the partition you want to place a label on, highlight that partition, and now look for a tab or a menu, probably called Partition, and in that Partition menu you should see "Label," which you would click on, and follow the instructions that pop-up for typing in the label.

[Robert24]

To all of you, thank you so much for this amazingly detailed answers! Now I feel much more confident about this re-installation.

There are two more things I wanted to ask:

1) About Hibernation, I don't know if what I was using before was hibernation or sleep. I remember that when it was in this state, the screen was turned off, and to restart the computer, I had to press on the power button (touching the touchpad wasn't enough). It wasn't using much energy and I used to find if very convenient when I had to interrupt a task I was performing for an hour or two. I'm pretty sure it was the default setting of Kubuntu 16.04 when one closes the lid. If it was sleep, then I don't need hibernation but if it was hibernation, then I would be happy to keep it even if it costs 20GB of storage.

2) I'm a bit concerned about the partition which seem to be responsible for the choice between the different OS at the beginning when I start my computer. I would be quite happy if it could be like before. It seemed that there was a problem with this also since I got this GRUB console popping out instead of the usual menu. Will I need to fix something related to this during my installation or this will be done automatically?

For the sake of information, here is a screenshot of mz kde partition manager before I touched the partitions:




and one after I deleted the old kubuntu partition



Best and thanks again.

[Robert24]

I did 1) to 8) but when I pressed apply in KDE partition manager, I had a problem with Plasma. Here are two screenshots.



and



And I realised that I had had a similar problem with plasma when my previous problem appeared. And when I think about it, I had several times this kind of plasma error popping out when I was using kubuntu (before I tried to extend it). It was mainly when I was closing some program so I didn t really care at the time. But maybe this explains the total mess that I had here.

I reopened kde partition manager and obtained this screen which seems to indicate that things when smoothly>



Best

[Snowhog]

Yup, the partition manager is showing you have your three partitions set up.

[mr_raider]

The KDE partition manager in the 16.04 live usb is old. It has issues with manipulations on gpt drives

I suggest installing gparted. Open a terminal and type

sudo apt install gparted

This is only for the live environment. You can then run gparted.

Once you successfully install kunbuntu we can show you how to upgrade the KDE applications.

Sent from my ONEPLUS A5010 using Tapatalk

[Robert24]

Hello everyone,

I followed the indications of oshunluvr in his post #94 and it seemed to work. When I shut down my computer, removed the live key, and restarted it, Windows booted (without giving me the choice to choose ubuntu). So I shut it down, when it the bios, and put ubuntu as the priority in the startup menu, then pressed f10 -> yes. But then this grub terminal that I mentioned before reappeared.

Does anyone have an idea what is the next step?

[mr_raider]

Deactivate secure boot in your bios if not done.

If that does not work, go back to the Live usb and run parted from the terminal

sudo parted -l

We will inspect the output and see what it looks like.

Sent from my ONEPLUS A5010 using Tapatalk

[mr_raider]

Robert it never occurred to me to check this but when you boot your kunbuntu live cd, what is the very first screen you see?

Is it a black screen with a box and white text that gives you the choice to boot or install ?

Or is it screen with colors and pictures that gives you the choice to boot or install?

Sent from my ONEPLUS A5010 using Tapatalk

[Robert24]

Hello mr_raider.

The ouput of sudo parted -l is

Model: ATA SAMSUNG MZ7LN512 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 512GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End    Size    File system     Name                          Flags
1      1049kB  274MB  273MB   fat32           EFI system partition          boot, hidden, esp
2      274MB   290MB  16.8MB                  Microsoft reserved partition  msftres
3      290MB   287GB  286GB   ntfs            Basic data partition          msftdata
5      287GB   313GB  26.2GB  ext4
6      313GB   486GB  173GB   ext4
7      486GB   490GB  4295MB  linux-swap(v1)
8      490GB   511GB  21.2GB  ext4
4      511GB   512GB  1049MB  ntfs            Basic data partition          hidden, diag

Warning: The driver descriptor says the physical block size is 2048 bytes, but
Linux says it is 512 bytes.

Secure boot was deactivated.

Concerning the first screens that I see when I boot from the live cd here is what I see:
1) The Lenovo logo (this was always my first screen)

2) A black screen with some little white drawing at the bottom (a kind of equation where there is a bar on the left, cut by a kind of silhouette, then equal sign, then a silhouette with a circle around it).

3) Some messages appearing briefly with white letters on black background which says (I took a picture with my phone and I will copy the content here)

[   0.188543] ACPI Error: [_PPC] Namespace lookup failure, AE_ALREADY_EXISTS (20160938/dswload-378)
[   0.188645] ACPI Exception: AE_ALREADY_EXISTS, During name lookup/catalog (20160930/psobject-227)

Hello mr_raider.

The ouput of sudo parted -l is

Model: ATA SAMSUNG MZ7LN512 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 512GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End    Size    File system     Name                          Flags
1      1049kB  274MB  273MB   fat32           EFI system partition          boot, hidden, esp
2      274MB   290MB  16.8MB                  Microsoft reserved partition  msftres
3      290MB   287GB  286GB   ntfs            Basic data partition          msftdata
5      287GB   313GB  26.2GB  ext4
6      313GB   486GB  173GB   ext4
7      486GB   490GB  4295MB  linux-swap(v1)
8      490GB   511GB  21.2GB  ext4
4      511GB   512GB  1049MB  ntfs            Basic data partition          hidden, diag

Warning: The driver descriptor says the physical block size is 2048 bytes, but
Linux says it is 512 bytes.

Secure boot was deactivated.

Concerning the first screens that I see when I boot from the live cd here is what I see:
1) The Lenovo logo (this was always my first screen)
2) A black screen with some little white drawing at the bottom (a kind of equation where there is a bar on the left, cut by a kind of silhouette, then equal sign, then a silhouette with a circle around it).
3) Some messages appearing briefly with white letters on black background which says (I took a picture with my phone and I will copy the content here)

[   0.188543] ACPI Error: [_PPC] Namespace lookup failure, AE_ALREADY_EXISTS (20160938/dswload-378)
[   0.188645] ACPI Exception: AE_ALREADY_EXISTS, During name lookup

3) There is indeed a screen with plenty of colors which gives me the possibility to choose between test and install.

But the thing is this last screen doesn't last long. Maybe one second, and then the live kubuntu session opens itself without me having selected anything.

4) A screen with kubuntu written (white on black)

5) Again some console error messages (around 10 this time). I will copy only the first two and I replace some numbers by *numbers*

ffff978b6f1b9320), AE_NOT_FOUND (20160930/psparse-543)
[   *numbers*] ACPI Error: Method parse/execution failed [\_PR.CPU4._CPC] (Node fff978b6f1b9dc0), AE_NOT_FOUND (*numbers*/psparse-543)
[   *numbers*] ACPI Error: [CPC1] Namespace lookup failure, AE_NOT_FOUND (*numbers*/psargs-359)

The other lines are very similar (method parse/execution failed) and at the end there are two lines with something like 'nouveau 0000:02:00.0: priv: HUBO: 6013d4 *numbers*' and 'nouveau 0000:02:00.0:bus: MMIO read of 00000000 FAULT at *numbers* [ IBUS ]

Here is the picture I used (but it's not very readable):


6) There is indeed a screen with plenty of colors which gives me the possibility to choose between test and install.

But the thing is this last screen doesn't last long. Maybe one second, and then the live kubuntu session opens itself without me having selected anything.