rahmu wrote@m0ei: Your comment is useless, doesn't add anything to the discussion, doesn't help the poster, as a matter of fact it does nothing but saying you like to show off. There's absolutely no shame in not knowing what partitioning a hard drive means, everybody got to start somewhere.
@dan961: Ok I'm going to give you a small tutorial on hard drive partitioning. Here goes:
What is a partition?
A partition is a "logical storage unit" laying on a physical disk. You can think about it as a "virtual hard drive". If you have worked on Windows, you are probably famniliar with C:[/b] and D:[/b] Each one of these is a separate "partition" although generally running on the same physical disk.
How many partitions can I install on my disk?
All the files in your disk belong to one (and only one) partition. Your disk could have one or many partitions installed at the same time.
Actually you are limited to a certain amount of partitions, but we won't go into that for now
Why do we need many partitions?
If you want to install two separate operating systems on your machine (considering you only have one hard drive), you better create two partitions: One for Windows and the other for Ubuntu.
If I'm running Windows, can I access the files in the Ubuntu partition?
This is where it gets complicated. Each partition is distinguished by a file system. File systems are simply ways of organizing your data on your disk. As you can imagine, Windows and Ubuntu do not use the same file systems.
Windows still uses (until Vista, I don't know about 7) an old file system developed by Microsoft and called NTFS. One main disadvantage of NTFS is that it requires the user to do frequent "defragmenting" or the file system will be very shaky, slow and .. well fat. Another problem with NTFS is really poor crash recovery. If your computer crashes while accessing some file on the hard drive, there are a lot of chances that the file will be corrupt.
Ubuntu uses by default a file System called ext4. It's not the best file system of all time, but it's way better than NTFS. It doesn't have the same problems as NTFS (no need for defrag, ever, and far better crash recovery) but it's also a lot safer, faster, and can handle larger amounts of data.
Anyway, the point is not file systems comparison, now here's the thing: For the last 3 years, Ubuntu has been able to read and write NTFS natively without any problem. So you can access your Windows file from Ubuntu without any problem. On the other hand, Windows cannot read nor write ext4 natively. I hear there are software you can install in order to achieve this, but I'll let someone who has actually tried them talk about them.
I have one C:\ partition, I want to create a second one!
If you have only one Windows/NTFS partition that takes the whole space of the disk, your easiest solution is to delete this partition and install two new ones: one NTFS one ext4. You can do this very easily from an Ubuntu install disk.
However this method, although the easiest one, has a major disadvantage: you will loose all your data saved on the disk! Of course if you back up your data first and save it on an external hard drive, then you won't have any problem (if not loosing some time transferring hundreds of Gigabytes from one disk to another.
The second method is more recent and a little more "experimental". The idea is to take your existing partition and resize it, in order to make enough free space for a new partition. The Ubuntu installer can do that, however I would not recommend this method if it's the first time you're installing an OS.
REMEMBER: always back up your data when you're installing/editing/removing an operating system.
That's a little theory that will get you started. Read this and don't hesitate to ask any question. Once you have understood this, re-read the tutorial I gave you and everything will be clearer.
Well ye, I'm sorry.
Ext2Read can read ext4 from windows 32 bit ONLY, 64 bit is not supported yet.
And currently it's the best till now between all.
download link :http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2read/