John, I am sorry I came into this discussion late, but I thought that the following WIKI link might be very useful for your friend. I had bought a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 about 3 years ago and found this WIKI to be invaluable to get around all the partitioning problems as well as the problems of installing a multi-boot configuration that would sit well with Windows Vista and company. http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki Hope it comes in handy. Peace, Frank On Tue, 2009-12-01 at 13:30 -0500, Prof. John C Nash wrote: > 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 > > _______________________________________________ > Linux mailing list > Linux [ at ] lists [ dot ] oclug [ dot ] on [ dot ] ca > http://oclug.on.ca/mailman/listinfo/linux