Dell Media Direct and Linux

[gold_finger]

Well, I downloaded your first attachment again to make sure I wasn't seeing things.

Turns out I happen to have an attachment from someone else that I had helped along the way also saved in my Downloads folder under a similar filename.  I didn't realize that before and had opened that one thinking it was yours.  My apologies for what surely was a very confusing post back to you as a result.  That wasn't your drive I ended up describing.  Duh!  :-[

Just so you know what I was looking at before, here it is:



Obviously, that's completely different than what you described which is why I was confused.

Now that I see your actual screenshot, it looks like a very simple fix to get dual booting with Linux Lite up and running.

1.  Follow preparations I outlined in first post under "While waiting for response back, to prepare for installation do the following".

2.  Boot Linux Lite DVD and open GParted  (Menu -> System -> Partition Drives).

3.  If you couldn't shrink the C: drive while in Windows, do it now with GParted.  (In GParted, it is partition "/dev/sda2".)  Shrink the partition by around 50GB for now.  (You can change things later on if you want, but that's plenty for now.)  Here's a tutorial on how to use GParted to familiarize yourself with using it:  http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/gparted.html.

IMPORTANT:  After shrinking the Windows partition, reboot the computer into Windows to let it adjust itself to the new size.  Then reboot with the Linux Lite DVD again.  You can finish the other GParted operations below, but don't start the LL installation until you've rebooted into Windows to let it make adjustments first.

4.  Still in GParted, delete the logical partition /dev/sda5.

5.  Then delete the extended partition /dev/sda3.  (Do this AFTER deleting sda5.)

6.  Hit the "Apply" button (the arrow button under the word "Help" along top of GParted interface) to execute all of the changes.  This may take a bit of time because of the shrinking operation.  (10 - 45 minutes maybe.)

7.  Now you'll have only 3 primary partitions left on the disk and empty, unpartitioned space for the Linux Lite installation.

8.  Close GParted.

(Reminder:  Reboot to Windows once after shrinking its partition if you haven't done so yet.)

9.  Start the LL installation and you should get a choice to install "Along side Windows" when you get to the "Installation Type" page.

10.  Choose install "Along side Windows" and the installer will automatically use the unpartitioned free space to create the LL partitions needed.  You'll end up with an extended partition containing two logical partitions -- one for root and another for swap.

11.  When install is done, shutdown, remove installation DVD and power back up into installation on the hard drive.  You should now be presented with options for booting either OS on startup.

That's it.


P.s.  I remembered how to post a pic to the forum.  Post the pic first to an imagebin site.  Then click the "insert image" button on the forum interface and post the link to it between the two image blocks -- eg.  [ img ] ...paste image link here... [ /img ].