Resizing a Windows Partition

After you give Ubuntu your login information, it is time to prepare the disk space for your installation. If you have a version of Windows installed and would like to keep it, there are special steps you need to take before setting up your Ubuntu partitions. When installing Ubuntu along side Windows, you can skip a few steps and perform a couple additional steps in the installation. What you will do is resize the Windows installation so that space is freed up for Ubuntu. After the partitioner has loaded, you will see a window that looks like this:

If you would like the partitioner to resize the Windows partition semi-automatically, specify the size of the new partition as a percentage of your entire hard disk. This is a bit tricky as too high a number will not leave enough room for your Windows partition, too low a percentage will be insufficient for an Ubuntu installation (see "A Word of Caution", below). If you feel you can do this with confidence, choose the first option "Resize and use freed space." Then go back to the main tutorial. Otherwise, choose "Manually edit partition table." This is by far the safer option and is the premise for the rest of this discussion.

When you do this, you must be careful not to reduce the Windows partition to its absolute minimum. To do so can, at best, make Windows run exceedingly slow. It will have no virtual RAM and will have to rely exclusively on your physical RAM. At worst, it could make the Windows installation inoperative because there may not be enough room for temporary files.

Further, this guidance on resizing a Windows partition understands that you have done both of the following:

• Backed up all of your data (not programs) from your Windows installation.
• Defragmented your harddrive.

The first is just good practice. If the power should fail or some other unforeseen event should happen during the installation, there is the possibility that the directory structure of your harddrive could be ruined. This is highly unlikely, but it is always better to be safe than sorry.

The second simply reduces your Windows partition to its absolutely smallest state. Because Windows is not a very good housekeeper, it leaves both temporary and permanent files strewn across a harddisk in a wide array; this may effectively called fragmentation. Parts of a single file can be spread throughout a disk, wherever there was diskspace when it was written.

Defragmentation puts all of the pieces together into a single block of bytes. This not only keeps everything together nicely but it also increases how quickly your computer can read the data. It is therefore not impossible for your diskspace consumption to be reduced by as much as one-third during defragmentation.

After choosing the manual option and clicking "Forward", you will be presented with a window like this one. Select the system marked "ntfs." If there are more than one, you will need to know which one to resize before proceeding. If you have more than one Windows partition, you can resize both partitions by repeating the steps outlined here. Some computers have a reserved portion of the disk which is used for a backup of the installation media. This is particularly common among laptop manufacturers. It is a reserved area that is not readily available for resizing, even though it will show on the map of the disk partitions. If your computer has such an area, you must decide whether to save it or not. If you choose not to save it, you may have to boot into your computer's BIOS to reclaim the space. If this is needed, see your computer's documentation for help with that process. Having selected the partition, right-click on the partition's entry in the list of partitions and select "New".

You will then be presented with a representation of your Windows partitition like the on above. The green block represents the full size of of the partition at present. The grey on either end represents the partition boundary and can safely be ignored.

Within the green block, the yellow shading indicates the amount of space currently used to store files related to your Windows installation. The white space indicates the amount of disk space that is part of the partition but not currently used for anything. It also indicates how much disk space you have to play with before you damage your Windows installation.

The arrow on the right indicates that the partition can be resized from that direction. If you are resizing a Windows partition that does not occur at the beginning of the disk, you will also see an arrow on the left side of the partition.

To resize your Windows partition, simply click and drag the arrow. If you prefer to be more precise, use the amount in the "New Size" box to indicate the size of the partition in megabytes.

The above image shows how much space I am allotting for the Windows installation. You will notice that there is still some white space still left. I did not restrict Windows to what is stored on the disk. This is because, as I mentioned earlier, Windows writes temporary files to the disk when it is running and thus needs a lot of virtual memory. By default, it uses all free space on the disk for virtual RAM. One must make allowances for this. After clicking "Resize", you will be presented with a window like the one below. Having resized your Windows partition, you are ready to create your first Ubuntu Linux partition.