Dualboot on Lenovo B570 - 3: Partitioning and installing

The Lenovo laptop uses already all 4 available primary partitions of the harddisk, so there is no place to install Linux. Fortunally one of the 4 used partitions is an extended partition which can hold as many logical partitions as you want.

To shrink the large partition holding the windows C: drive I first defragmented the harddrive from within Windows 7 and then used the Windows Disk Manager to shrink it. It let me shrink the partition only to 280GB for some reason, but that's totally enough and I always can access the space on this partition from Linux, too.

After shrinking the large partition I resized the extended partition to use the now available free space (otherwise the installers of Fedora and Ubuntu will complain that they cannot generate partitions!).

From here on the installers of Fedora and Ubuntu can handle the rest of the partitioning. Make sure you have a wired connection to the internet if you want to run updates during installation (because wireless needs some manual help - see part 4 of this post series).

Reboot and select Fedora or Ubuntu from the Linux submenu of the XBoot boot screen. During installation select custom layout for your partitions and generate a layout similar to this for each of the Linux installations:

1. a boot partition of 100-500MB mounted at /boot and formatted ext2
2. a root partition of 10-20GB mounted at / and formatted ext4
3. a home partition of 10-20GB mounted at /home and formatted ext4
4. a swap partition of 4-16GB (twice your RAM) formatted as swap

For my laptop I want to handle the initial bootloading by the windows bootloader. So I selected not to install any linux bootloader to the MBR of the harddisk, but to their own boot partition.

Since the swap partition is used for hibernate each linux installation requires its own swap partition. After installation make sure that in /etc/fstab is just ONE swap partition per installation enabled (of course a different one as in the other installation!).

After both installers had run I booted back into Windows 7 and used EasyBCD to add an bootloader menu entry for Fedora and Ubuntu.

It wasn't that complicated. But wait: there is still something missing. Wireless LAN is not working in both linux installations.