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How-To Geek Forums / Linux

Problems Installing a Linux operating system on my Dell Inspiron Mini.

(5 posts)
  • Started 3 months ago by LinWinApp
  • Latest reply from whs
  • Topic Viewed 350 times

LinWinApp
Posts: 1

The problem is with my Harddrive. I get a "The creation of swap space in partition 5 has failed" error. Could anyone help me out with this?

Posted 3 months ago #
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whs
whs
Posts: 17584

Do you have any other OS installed. If yes, post a picture of Disk Management.

Posted 3 months ago #
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presence1960
presence1960
Posts: 280

From the Live CD/USB boot to desktop, open a terminal and run sudo fdisk -l
That is a lower case L. Post the output from that command here.

Also are you trying to create a dual boot, or run Linux only?

Posted 3 months ago #
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presence1960
presence1960
Posts: 280

Just from thinking a bit, I am assuming your mini has windows already installed. With OEM machines you almost always have at least 3 partitions already. You usually have a partition for your OS (Windows), a recovery partition, and usually some sort of utility partition. Depending on the OEM you may even have the windows System Reserved partition which is the partition that contains files necessary to boot windows. You may be at the maximum of 4 partitions on an MBR disk. That is why I asked to see the output of that terminal command from linux Live CD. whs's suggestion will accomplish the same thing, but will be run from windows. Either way will suffice.

Posted 3 months ago #
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whs
whs
Posts: 17584

That was exactly my suspicion. That's why I asked for a disk management picture so that we could see what's going on. But the OP never came back. Maybe he solved the problem.

Posted 3 months ago #
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