03-12-2014, 03:53 PM
Thanks guys 
Valtam: your suggestion to give the ext4 partitions a mount point was spot on. A note in the installation guide would help future newbies as well
Having set that the install failed at about 95% of copying files. Turned out the downloaded ISO was corrupted. Should have done a MD5. New ISO and it installed but wouldn't boot off the hard disk. Had to do the following:
1. define a small FAT16 partition at the front of the hard disk and set the flag to bios_grub - GParted set a minimum of 16MB.
I did have sda4 for this in the original partition plan but thought maybe it ought to be a the start of the HD.
2. set the root partition flag to boot
3. set the "Device for boot loader installation" to /dev/sda
then reinstalled OK.
gold_finger: Thank you for your comprehensive advice. Windows is a final fall back, so I'm setting aside HD space just in case. I have some key data that I still want to use with some 16/32bit applications (e.g. accounts, emails). Option 1 is to try Wine; option 2: Virtual Box and XP (provided I can get it to run on a new h/w); option 3 is dual boot with Windows 7.
I had read about the need for a bios boot partition but not about a "Microsoft Reserved" partition - so thanks for that. Hopefully wont come to the need to install Win7.
Here's the final partitioning:
![[Image: gparted-final-install.png]](http://www.alancooper.me.uk/images/gparted-final-install.png)
PS for some reason GParted keeps turning the label for sda3 into upper case - not important as I've hidden it.
Valtam: your suggestion to give the ext4 partitions a mount point was spot on. A note in the installation guide would help future newbies as well
Having set that the install failed at about 95% of copying files. Turned out the downloaded ISO was corrupted. Should have done a MD5. New ISO and it installed but wouldn't boot off the hard disk. Had to do the following:
1. define a small FAT16 partition at the front of the hard disk and set the flag to bios_grub - GParted set a minimum of 16MB.
I did have sda4 for this in the original partition plan but thought maybe it ought to be a the start of the HD.
2. set the root partition flag to boot
3. set the "Device for boot loader installation" to /dev/sda
then reinstalled OK.
gold_finger: Thank you for your comprehensive advice. Windows is a final fall back, so I'm setting aside HD space just in case. I have some key data that I still want to use with some 16/32bit applications (e.g. accounts, emails). Option 1 is to try Wine; option 2: Virtual Box and XP (provided I can get it to run on a new h/w); option 3 is dual boot with Windows 7.
I had read about the need for a bios boot partition but not about a "Microsoft Reserved" partition - so thanks for that. Hopefully wont come to the need to install Win7.
Here's the final partitioning:
PS for some reason GParted keeps turning the label for sda3 into upper case - not important as I've hidden it.