Hdd Partitioning

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yellowbadger52

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Well I'm not too wise in the partitioning a hard drive area of computers. I have a few questions.

1. Can i partition a hard drive that already has data on it? Its just a storage drive no os on it.

2. How can i dual boot linux on my pc. I want to give it a try to see what all the buzz is about. :D

3. I have a lot of data, music movies, games, etc on my storage drive. Will i still be able to access them in linux?

4. What version of linux do you reccomend. I want to try running steam on linux if possible. I saw Existence was doing it and i wanna see if there is a performance difference between the 2 os's.

Sorry for all the questions im a noob at this area of computers. Also could you reccomend free programs to use for partioning?

Thanks in advance. :)
 
smoochee said:
Well I'm not too wise in the partitioning a hard drive area of computers. I have a few questions.

1. Can i partition a hard drive that already has data on it? Its just a storage drive no os on it.

2. How can i dual boot linux on my pc. I want to give it a try to see what all the buzz is about. :D

3. I have a lot of data, music movies, games, etc on my storage drive. Will i still be able to access them in linux?

4. What version of linux do you reccomend. I want to try running steam on linux if possible. I saw Existence was doing it and i wanna see if there is a performance difference between the 2 os's.

Sorry for all the questions im a noob at this area of computers. Also could you reccomend free programs to use for partioning?

Thanks in advance. :)
Click to expand...

1. Yes, Vista's Partition Editor works just fine.

2drzxbd.jpg


2. Most Linux distributions will setup dual boot automatically.

3. Yep.

4. I recommend Ubuntu. You can run Steam on Linux with Wine.
 
Yep, Steam works on Linux all right, except for a few bits of garbled text. I would recommend either Linux Mint or Ubuntu, depending on your visual preference. (Linux Mint is essentially Ubuntu with a different look and more packages)
 
ok thank you very much. I cant wait to test drive this when i get back to my room after class. I wish we were actually doing something right now...

I dont mind text glitches really. Thats not much of a problem to me.

Thanks for cleaing up my questions. Ill let you know how everything goes later tonight.

Also, what programs do you reccomend to use with linux? I know like open office but what about media players and w/e else everyone uses?

edit: One last qeustion. How do i go about installing ubuntu? Do i just put it on a flash drive or what?
 
you should be able to just dl and install i thought but i might be mistaken lol, and btw linux doesnt have many good players but try divx player its good, :)
 
For installing Ubuntu, you can either burn the ISO to a disc (easiest) or use a program to put it on a flash drive (I cant remember what its called)

For music, you can either use Songbird or Amarok. Songbird is much more lighter, and has plugins, and is made by the same people that made Firefox. But Amarok has much more features and integration.
 
ok sounds good i can do that. Also one last question i just thought of. Do i need to install drivers for my mobo, videocard, sound card, etc?
 
smoochee said:
ok sounds good i can do that. Also one last question i just thought of. Do i need to install drivers for my mobo, videocard, sound card, etc?
Click to expand...

Not necessary. You will just have to install restricted graphics drivers, but Ubuntu will do that for you. You just need to confirm it. :)
 
Well good news everyone i got linux installed last night and it works great so far. I havent had to chance to do much with programs and stuff just because i havent had the time :(. But my pc successfully works dual booting! I choose linux mint because it was a little bit smaller of a download and i could download it at 4 times the speed of the site i was trying to download ubuntu from. I like it so far and hopefully sunday ill be bale to play around and install wine and steam. :) i might need help with that but ill let yall know if i have any trouble then. Thanks for the help everyone!
 
Late to the party, but you don't even need to partition stuff to install Ubuntu. It can install in a folder on your C:\ drive or whatever
 
Yea, but that requires him to run it within Window's in a way, which defeats the purpose. Anyway, congrats Smoochee, welcome to the Linux community. I think you would have had a better experience with Ubuntu, but Mint is a great choice. On the issue of drivers, you will not be required to install any new drivers, they should come with the install. However, to run some games successfully on Wine, it might be necessary to install new drivers such as Nvidia's beta drivers or any form of ATI drivers (depending on your card).
 
smoochee said:
Well good news everyone i got linux installed last night and it works great so far. I havent had to chance to do much with programs and stuff just because i havent had the time :(. But my pc successfully works dual booting! I choose linux mint because it was a little bit smaller of a download and i could download it at 4 times the speed of the site i was trying to download ubuntu from. I like it so far and hopefully sunday ill be bale to play around and install wine and steam. :) i might need help with that but ill let yall know if i have any trouble then. Thanks for the help everyone!
Click to expand...

I got ticked off with Windows one day an decided to install Ubuntu, which I have had a little experience with Linux, but not much. So when I decided to do this the first thing that came to mind was. "How can I get all my games up and running on Linux?" This was easily answered when I found out about Crossover.

Crossover is a lot like Wine, (it is actually based on it) but it is a whole lot simpler to use. It does cost money, ($39 for the game version, $70 for the full package which includes support for many Windows applications) but it is well worth it for getting great support for games. Which I know you aren't making the complete switch to Linux from Windows, but it does make things so much easier if you do.

I did make the switch back to Windows mainly because once I got my main game at the time (World of Warcraft) up and running, I had to run it in OpenGL which make it not look that great. Linux does not support DirectX.... but have I got good news for all of you people who wish it did... the newest version of Crossover is going to support DirectX!!!

Now I'm not advertising to go out and buy it because of this. I'm waiting on the release of it to test it out fully on my new system once I get my replacement mobo from Asrock. If anyone has any questions as how it runs, send me a message and I'll be more then happy to answer the questions to the best of my ability.

Sorry for the long post... just letting you know about Crossover encase you didn't
 
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