I use multiple drives in a couple of desktops, and still have 9.04 on them. I also use VirtualBox and have Windows 2000 Pro installed. And by some coincidence, I divide each into three Ubuntu Partitions and have three swap partitions, one for each Ubuntu partition. Maybe I am doing things differently. First, I also use manual mode, and partition the whole drive during the first install. That means I set up all the partitions on the first go around, then I install Ubuntu on the third and leave the other two unused. I have only the third swap designated as swap. That over, I go back around and do the second partition and the second swap. Then on the third go around I do the first partition and the first swap. I recall that I could see multiple drives when I did this, but I figured three Ubuntu Partitions were enough for my purpose, The second hard drive was just divided up into two Windows 2000 Pro partitions.
I always ran into issues when I did this, mostly because the drives were not pristine. Because one partition or another might fail at some point, I spent a lot of time in recovery efforts to get my data back. I ended up sharing the drives as Shared Folders under VirtualBox, and moved data about, mostly making multiple copies of my VDI files on each drive. I learned to use a gparted.iso image I found online to manage my drives when I had trouble booting up. It helped a lot. But I am not informed enough to use the recovery mode to get back a failed installation if you try to boot Ubuntu anyway. You get to a certain point in the process, you have to tell it what to do next or take over manually. Should be a book written on the subject of what to do then. I am now using 10.04 LTS on my laptop, which I upgraded to a 1TB drive. They are more plentiful now and the prices have gone down to $100 or less. I got two for a total price of under $176. That gives me a spare. I had also bought a 1TB My Passport for under $100 that is also 2.5" in size. That is small enough to sit under my laptop on a lap board that has a mount built up of three layers of paint sticks that I got for free from a hardware store. Had to pay for the white glue to bond them together of course. I did not buy the drives all at once, just as I felt I could afford them. I interlace the paint sticks to ensure there is good air flow between them. Don't want the laptop to get too hot. Anyway I now have a 17" laptop with a 1TB internal and 1TB external drive connected. The external drive is formatted NTFS still and I just copy files to it. The internal 1TB is divided into 3 Ubuntu partitions and now I only use one swap partition, not three. That's a total of four partitions for the internal drive. I know you can get away with more than four partitions on a hard drive, but I decided to try just four, and it works fine. I had thought the matter through again, and while in theory you can have more than one Windows 2000 Pro up and running at once, you are limited by the devices such as the DVD/CD drive and external drive as to what can be shared. Besides if you want access to the files on a different client, just mount that client as an alternative under Storage in your settings. That way you only have to deal with one instance of Windows 2000 Pro at a time. I've also used the NTFS drive and other two partitions under Ubuntu to house my /home folders and files, in preparation for totally reformatting one of the Ubuntu partitions if I suspect partition problems. Otherwise, I might just reinstall over the existing version with the same or later version and elect not to reformat that partition as part of the install. The only folders and files replaces have to do with the system, and the others are fine as they are. Of course reinstalling Ubuntu means also having to reinstall VirtualBox and other added packages, but you get the knack of it after awhile. I'm just passing on my experiences. What I can tell you is super important if you don't want to keep wasting your time repeating yourself is to work with the best drives you can get or afford. I even wrote a comment under suggestions with Oracle is that they ought to make using VirtualBox redundant so that it one VDI file fails for any reason, you have a clone there to keep working with, and it goes further by producing a new clone of itself so that the redundancy keeps moving forward. You don't have that as a feature, so you have to take some time to keep the cloning process going on your own. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/376765 Title: Partition Problems with Install Process with 9.04 To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/376765/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
