Have been helping a friend with a new Lenovo G550 to set up Ubuntu. We
have eventually decided (for now) to put Jaunty on a USB key (already
tested an external HD and it's fine) because the wonderful nasties at
Lenovo have put 5 partitions on the drive, plus leaving some unallocated
space.
As I recall, the structure was
1 MB free unallocated
200 MB NTFS /dev/sda1
187 GB NTFS /dev/sda2
30 GB NTFS /dev/sda3 (extended)
30 GB NTFS /dev/sda5
14.5 GB NTFS /dev/sda4
(with some odd unallocated bits of about 1MB between)
This, of course, means that one needs to do some work to set up a Linux
partition. On my wife's Asus Eee 1005HA, there were 4 partitions (C: D:
recovery and winboost), but D: was empty and same size as C:, so
replaced it with Karmic with no fuss.
Does anyone have a good strategy for dealing with the Lenovo-style
situation, which I fear is more or less a deliberate setup to block dual
boot? This might make a very good tutorial / advice topic, and of course
be beneficial to the Linux community generally, since many folk are
reluctant to go to all-Linux right away. I find they eventually forget
how to use Windows once they have Linux, but getting them going means
finding convenient ways to set up dual boot.
Cheers, JN