How do I understand the partition table? (I want to start over.)
- by Sammy Black
I have Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid installed through wubi on my laptop (it came with Windows 7 preinstalled). This was my first foray into Linux, and I'm here to stay. I have no use for Windows, and yet I must manually choose not to boot into it!
Should I shrink the Windows partition to something negligible and grow the Linux one using something like gparted or fdisk, and just be content that everything runs? In that case, I need to understand the filesystems. Which is which?
Here's the output of $ df -h:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/loop0 17G 11G 4.5G 71% /
none 1.8G 300K 1.8G 1% /dev
none 1.8G 376K 1.8G 1% /dev/shm
none 1.8G 316K 1.8G 1% /var/run
none 1.8G 0 1.8G 0% /var/lock
none 1.8G 0 1.8G 0% /lib/init/rw
/dev/sda3 290G 50G 240G 18% /host
I would prefer to start over with a clean install of 10.10 Maverick, but I fear what I may lose. Certainly, I will backup my home directory tree (gzip?), but what about various pieces of software that I've acquired from the repositories? Can I keep a record of them?
By the way, I asked a similar question over on Ubuntu forums.
