[dswo]

I have a Mini with 1G RAM/16G SSD. It came installed with WinXP and I'm trying to set it up for dual boot with Ubuntu. I made a USB version of Ubuntu (8.1) and can boot to it, but when I try to partition the drive for dual boot, it will only let me partition the whole drive. Using partition editor, here is what I see:

FAT16: 39.19 Mb
NTFS (label: OS): 14.31 Gb

For NTFS, there is an explanation and an error message: "Unable to find mountpoint."

I have run chkdsk /f in Windows. The first time it found errors in the uppercase table and repaired them. I rebooted a couple times, reran chkdsk with no errors. Rebooted two more times, but still get "Unable to find mountpoint" for the main, NTFS drive.

Suggestions?

I'm fairly knowledgeable about Windows, but new to Linux.

[GerallK]

Have you tried using an open-source partitioning tool?

The gparted Super Disk is a great CD to have in your toolbox, and it can re-size NTFS partitions...

[Fanfoot]

I assume if you resize the NTFS partition down, you can take it from there, e.g. install Ubuntu and let it install grub, etc into the new empty space.

I would just download a livecd copy of gparted and use it to resize the NTFS partition before doing the Ubuntu install. Or if you want something commercial use Acronis True Image. Both have worked fine for me in the past. If you need a USB thumb drive version because you don't have a CD Rom drive, you'll have to google the process yourself. I know its out there. In theory, Acronis can create a bootable USB thumb drive, but it hasn't worked for me on the Mini 9, so I'd stick with gparted if you're going that route.

[dswo]

Thank you for the suggestions. I had an inkling that it might be thumbdrive LiveCD (which was made with persistence on). The hint: I also noticed that when I booted in "Try without installing" mode that it did not start X automatically.

My solution: make a fresh thumb install, with persistence off, using my original CD. When I did this, I was able to read and resize the NTFS partition using the Ubuntu partition editor.