A simple solution: use Ubuntu's automatic format option, it will format the entire external hard drive and create the necessary drives (warning: all files on the hard drive will be deleted) after installing Ubuntu, remove the hard drive from it and restart the computer with live Ubuntu flash memory (you should have a separate flash memory on which the Ubuntu iso file has been flashed) after restarting the computer and running connect the Ubuntu external hard drive to the computer and run the gparted program, this program is used to format drives and create new drives. Shrink the drive on which Ubuntu is installed with gparted and create as many ntfs drives as you need in the freed space. In this way, you have an external hard drive on which Ubuntu is installed, but not all of its space is occupied by Ubuntu, and you can use it to save files in Windows.
Discussion
24.10 just keeps erroring out. I wiped an internal drive a could do without to see if the install would proceed normally. Now downloading an older version 24.04. All I really want to do for now is learn the OS and some command line stuff. It’s been a real time sink so far. Ideally I’d like to just get off Windows entirely and just get a dedicated Linux laptop that’s largely offline for running Sparrow and as a terminal for talking to my start9. It’s been painful so far
The first steps are always the hardest, then everything gets easier. Good luck!
Thanks for your input. I finally have a working copy of Ubuntu on a separate external drive so I can get my feet wet on Linux command line stuff and test a bunch of stuff. Before it was all done I had a couple of heart stopping hours when the installer partitioned and overwrote a part of my primary backup drive to use as the bootloader. It also rendered that drive unrecognizable by Windows till I fixed that. Fortunately I had already backed up all of my super critical stuff before I started, and recently burned 20 years of photos onto DVD’s, so everything I lost was just fluff. So I effectively chopped my critical files down to what I really need. From 200GB of crap down to 4.5GB that can go on thumb drives.
Then, I imaged EVERYTHING and made a recovery stick so I can wipe everything and do a total rebuild of the whole system in about an hour of recovery time. But not before I had to run a full chkdsk on my main OS drive. Literally every skill I’ve ever learned about disk management, DOS commands and redundant data storage came into play over what should have been a simple OS install. And I only lost about 20 hours of sleep over 3 days. Looking forward to getting a dedicated Linux laptop so I don’t have to dual boot.
And the beautiful part is, all of my BTC stuff and my connection to my node and my Electrum server was unaffected because it’s totally segregated.
It was a good effort bro👍
In general, to learn Linux, you must love manipulating the OS and exploring its different parts. Linux is a paradise for geeks.