Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2014 February 2

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February 2

Toshiba satellite Windows 8 question

I have a Satellite laptop toshiba and it comes with win 8 and I want to put Linux mint on the laptop on a different partition. all the partitions are taken up 4/4 one is the main partition and the rest are toshiba factory reset stuff for back ups and what not. My question is how do I remove the data from one of the partitions and put it on a USB and then transfer it else where? How do I add gigabytes to another partition so I can share some of the 0.5Tb harddrive with the linux OS? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.42.31.250 (talk) 08:38, 2 February 2014 (UTC) ck

First back up your important data, no need to remove it. It won't be deleted if you do everything right, but you never know. Second you create a Linux live-CD and you boot from the CD and run Gparted. Gparted will let you create a new partition where you will install Linux. When resizing an old Windows partition, Gparted works better if you first defragment it, but if you have enough space, that won't be needed. Create at least a 20 GB partition. Something like 100 or 150 GB won't harm either. Now run the installer. Most Linux installers will guide you step by step from now on, asking you about user name, passwords, stuff like that. At the end you'll need to create a GNU GRUB entry for your Linux OS. If everything goes well when you re-boot now you will see a menu asking you either you want to boot Windows or Linux. OsmanRF34 (talk) 13:20, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

I think the problem is that Toshiba has rather rudely filled all four slots in the MBR partition table, leaving no room for Linux even if they're resized. -- BenRG (talk) 23:48, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Well, but he could take one of these primary partitions and convert it into a extended partition. I know that Windows' boot files have to be on a primary partition, but Linux can be installed in an extended partition. On a side note, I wonder what is in these 4 partitions. 1 is for Windows recovery, 1 is c:, a third might be a Toshiba recovery thing, and the 4th? I wonder if the laptop has 2 Windows versions. Maybe some computers for the Canadian market have one French and one English version.OsmanRF34 (talk) 00:46, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

I know how to do all that stuff except for the getting the data off of the partition. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.42.31.250 (talk) 23:32, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

I think most of the products at Comparison of disk cloning software can back up and restore a raw partition. You can also do the backup with dd (I recommend this version for Windows) but you have to be very careful that you actually backed up the correct partition before you delete it, and even more careful that you're writing to the correct partition when restoring. -- BenRG (talk) 23:48, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Clonezilla is excellent, in my experience. And the price is right. Morenoodles (talk) 07:13, 3 February 2014 (UTC)