Install Win 7 or Zorin first

I am in need of installing Win7 again and want to tinker with Zorin. Just want to know if it is better to install Zorin first or do the win 7 install and then Zorin. Also, I was thinking about a dedicated partition for Zorin of about 25Gb and was wondering the best way to set that up. Not familiar with Linux installs and only know that there are usually two partitions in an linux install but not the proper set up for that. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Best to install win7 first.
Zorin has an option during installation to be installed in parallel with win7 and you can also move a slider to select the exact size of the partition you want for Zorin.

OK. I just remember some time ago when I played with other versions of Linux there was something with partitioning that requires 2 partitions for the installation. One was small and the other was larger. Don't remember the significance of that but if it isn't required for this, that's fine. It is just that Faronics DeepFreeze has borked my Win7 install and it is time to reinstall. I am hoping that deleting the partitions and redoing it all from there will fix it all. DeepFreeze seems to be next to impossible to get rid of once the installation borks itself. I looked all night and couldn't locate a working solution to get rid of it. Now my PC is starting to BSD on me.

Hi,

once you have installed W7, start your installation of Linux and when the installer asks where you want to install, select "Something Else" and you can manually install Linux using your current partitions assuming you have soem already to go!!.

See also:

http://www.installubuntulinux.com/2011/ ... natty.html

and:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1616

Regards Wolfman

Well, went for the install and during something called gnomenu constantly crashed until the installation crashed as well. tried a second time and same result. Quit the installation and Windblows had to do a chkdsk.

Plus, now I have a partition on my hard drive I don't know exactly what to do with. Thought about just screwing around with Ubuntu, but have no idea how to set it up using the "something else" choice. It seems to think there are multiple OS'es on the hard drive. I choose "something else" and delete the partitions then try to istall on them and it says, "No root file system defined. Please correct this from the partitioning menu.

Well, nevermind. I made it past all that c*** Ubuntu. Waiting for install to finish now to see if it will install and actually work unlike Zorin did.

Hi,

here are a couple of links that may help you:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1616

http://blog.sudobits.com/2011/04/23/how ... usb-or-cd/

Regards Wolfman

just kinda aggrevates me that I spent ALL that time downloading Zorin and it won't install.

Well, I have 2 hard drives and until today each had only one partition. So, I'd say 2 before this. The thing now is that Zorin finally installed but it is slow. The internet is painfully slow. I feel like I time warped about 12 years or so. I feel like I am on an old 486 machine with a dial-up connection. It's terrible! I opened my laptop, woke it and made it to this point and my PC STILL hasn't loaded the forum page! I started it before I even thought about the laptop sitting next to me.

Don't know about the Chkdsk part. Didn't do that, but I had just installed Win7 and did defrag the HDD and registry early yesterday before I had installed Zorin. Did the gparted thing where I encountered my first issue. Finally got past the partitioning part. used roughly 50GB partition for Linux and gave it a 3072swap.

But, I still don't see why Ubuntu installed and was fast ans Zorin installed after that and is so painfully slow. Now I want to go back to Ubuntu, but it won't have the other nice little bells and whistles I wanted to play with that Zorin has.

Hi,

start your PC in recovery mode (2nd option on the boot menu) and firstly run "fsck" and then "dpkg" and restart your PC.

Regards Wolfman

All I can say is, ugh! I guess the free open-source editions of the windows-like flavors of linux are just c***. This was true when I tinkered with open suse. Just c***.

I "dumbed" down the dvd so it would run at lower ata/udma and it installed in one smooth quick shot. Then it does run a bit better than it did before. I just can't do anything without MAJOR effort. Try to update repository? Constantly fails! try to update? FAIL! Keep seeing a pop up saying in need to fix broken packages. Keep booting to that recovery mode and soing the fsck and dpkg thing, but it continues. I guess if I'm gonna play with linux, I'll likely play with just straight ubuntu. At least it seemed to run well right off.

Kind of aggrevating trying to find out what to do as well. Look for something and never find anything that really pertains to the version I have, etc. I just can't figure linux.

Don't know how to do that and atm I have Ubuntu 11.1 installed, so it wouldn't necessarily help. Would it? It might since the partitions are set up the same way. You tell me ...

Hi BC,

if you managed to install Ubuntu 11.10 there should be no reason why you cannot install Zorin which is based on Ubuntu 11.04, it can only have something to do with the disk you are using, have you tried the same disk on another PC and does it also fail!!??.

You can take a look at this how-to if you like:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1616

It has a number of links which may well prove helpful to you

Regards Wolfman

Wolfman, it will install, it's just c*** after install. Just the unpredictability of how it acts and the failure of so many updates such as repositories and so on.

Install Win 7 first on a hard drive with one partition.You might have to delete some partitions using the Windows installer or better yet, use any live linux cd and use 'gparted' to delete all partitions and then create partitions sda1, sda2 and sda3 for the linux swap space. With Windows already installed, use windows to defrag the NTFS partition in Windows then run the live Zorin DVD or CD, open gparted and resize the Win7 partition to about half of the hard drive size. If you don't defrag windows first, it very confuzed the next time you start it and it will take a long time for it to recover file locations and some files may be lost.Then create a new partition using ext4 file system leaving about 3 or 4 gigabytes AFTER the new partition using the resize slider which will probably be called "sda2". Then 'create' another partition with the remaining 'unused' space and format it to 'linux swap' and it will be sda3.
Now you can install the fabulous Zorin on 'sda2' and use the 'change' option to set the mounting point as "\" and format to ext4 and choose "use as a primary partition". Don't encrypt the OS.

Nice thing about Zorin is that it will write up a nice grub for you. Windows will not write a grub to MBR that shows Zorin or Linux, nor will it recognize Linux partitions..
I have often had to use Puppy's "grub 4DOS" program to rewrite grubs after some Linux's don't show all the OS's on the drives. You can also edit the grub to set the order of OS's in the list. This is handy for setting the default OS that will start unattended. Also gives you a reboot or halt option

Oh yea, install Windows on the SDA1 partition first. You should see it the partitions list. Use Gparted to format it to NTFS, then install windows. You could format all the partitions to NTFS and then reformat them when installing Zorin.

BuffaloChips wrote:Wolfman, it will install, it's just c*** after install. Just the unpredictability of how it acts and the failure of so many updates such as repositories and so on.

Ho BC,

sorry that I didn't respond to this earlier, Swarf has made suggestions about partitioning etc, did you check out the how-to section:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1694

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1617

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1618

@VN,

if you want to repair your GRUB, I suggest you use Boot repair:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1895

Download and burn a CD, it is a great tool!!.

Regards Wolfman