On 04.03.15 22:10, Keith Bainbridge wrote:
On 04/03/15 21:22, Erik Christiansen wrote:
At the first "Installation type" dialogue, the alternatives to "Something else" are to install over or beside the ubuntu distros found on the two old drives. That dialogue does_not_ recognise the presence of the new drive. If it did, I might not be forced down the only other path.
Could I suggest that you disconnect your old disks, and ensure taht the new disk is in SATA1.
That sounds like a simple way out. ISTR that the BIOS should allow me to select the boot priority of the disks. A consequence of installer ignorance of the older distros would be that I'd have to manually hack the grub menu to add those boot options. (I always leave the immediately prior distro conveniently accessible, because it usually takes me a month to add all the apps I need to the new one.)
It's been a while since I had a blank disk, but I thought that the something else appeared as the 3rd option (after take over disk or use blank space); but my memory may be corrupted by several different installs on VBox since.
You're right, but as stated, neither overwrite, nor use blank space on the old drives, does anything to install on the new drive. ;-) It's at the "Something else" dialogue that the new drive is first recognised, and the partitioning button there appears to do nothing useful.
If your not wedded to Ubuntu, why not try Mint. The current version is based on Ubuntu LTS, with some updates. I don't want to start a war with this, but I have found Mint a little more user friendly (says he who has just install Debian testing on my laptop, primarily because I am tired of the upgrade process needed with Ubuntu and its clones.)
I have Debian with LXDE on the laptop. It might be simplest to install the latest of that on the desktop. I think you've pushed me in the direction I should have followed from the start. I have just been looking at parted's mklabel command: LABEL-TYPE is one of: aix, amiga, bsd, dvh, gpt, mac, msdos, pc98, sun, loop and was wondering whether it is only with an msdos table that we have primary, extended, and logical partitions. This doesn't appear to elucidate: http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/manual/parted.html#Using-Parted I might look a bit further into that, because it would be nice to be able to do it on the command line again, to circumvent obstructive GUIs. Many thanks. Erik -- In the Original Vulcan: "Dif-tor heh smusma." Live long and prosper. (Spock)