HI,

I am having trouble installing Linux over Vista. I have tried Ubantu and Red Hat Linux 9. In red hat when it comes on partitioning phase it gives error message somthing like "No device found to alter partition table". I dont remember the exact message. I have four partitions on my harddisk. While installing Ubantu the setup simply crashes on partition phase. PLease help me solve this problem.

Thanks

Hello,

Are you able to use the partition manager in either of those Linux distro's?

How are your partitions laid out? e.g, 4 primary partitions or 3 primary 1 logical etc...

If you can try deleting a partiton in the partition manager (windows or linux) and retry the setup.

- Let us know how it goes.

For one thing, redhat 9 is very very old and not supported any more.

What version of ubuntu are you trying?

if you have the latest ubuntu it will autopartition and setup grub with just a few clicks no brain power needed.

I think this problem is due to partition.
I read somewhere that we cannot have more than 4 'Primary' partitions on one hdd.
If you can, first free one partition among your 4 partitions fro linux and then try.

You can only have a maximum of 4 primary partitions. If the partitioning program is crashing then I'm assuming that you've reached this limit. Try moving all of your data off of one of these partitions and then using that partition for Linux.

Thankyou very much to all of you for your response. From the frour partition, three of them were primary. I have redone partitions. now I have redone partitions. One is primary and two are logical, total are three. This time I tried Ubantu Server 9.04 and successfully installed it. I do not remember during installation it asked me for root password or not. but it did asked me for a non root account and password which I remember. The problem is that I am unable to login through root user. Is their some default password for root user? Second problem is that I am unable to switch into graphical mode. Do Ubantu Server support graphical mode or not. and third question is that what should I do If I want to uninstall current version of Ubantu to install some other such as simple Ubantu (not server) or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Is formating the linux partition from my vista a good choice. Obviously it will not erase boot loader information so what should I do?

Thanks

a) Ubuntu Server does not come with a GUI by default. You can enable one via the command:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

sudo: run an application with root privileges (or other user's privileges is possible as well)
apt-get install: install an application (requires internet connection)
ubuntu-desktop: Gnome and all default desktop apps
(If you wanted a GUI you could have installed the Desktop edition of Ubuntu instead... but no worries)

b) Ubuntu doesn't allow you to login as root by default for security reasons. Use: "sudo command" instead. You really don't need to log in as root, sudo is safer and it leaves a log of what you did so it's easier to undo actions later on if you need to.

c) If you decide to go with a different version of Linux there is no need to format from Windows. The installer will format during the installation. If you format from Windows and then reboot you won't be able to boot into Windows until you install Linux again or remove grub (the boot loader) so do be careful. The reason for this is because grub uses data that's located on your Linux partition in order for it to work. If you decide to delete Linux make sure you delete grub before rebooting. There's some tool you can download for this but for the life of me I can't remember what it's called. Sorry.

Thankyou very much necrolin.

Your post was really helpful.