Once that is done, I will spend some more time (a lot more time) explaining what really happened, and what the alternatives are. So once again, I am going to present things in a sort of backwards order - I'm going to show the installation dialog, and I'm going to run through the installation in the simplest possible way. Even worse for me, some readers are just going to throw up their hands and say 'this Linux stuff is just too complicated', when in fact it really isn't. If I try to present all of that first, though, a lot of readers are going to give up and move on to a more interesting article. In order to understand disk partitioning and make really good, informed decisions about this part of installing Linux, a lot of underlying information is required.

If you don't know what MBR, GPT or EFI mean, don't worry: it basically means the laptop disk I use will be very similar to most computers purchased with Windows 7 or older, but not like one with Windows 8 or Windows 10.

I will be using an old Lenovo T400 notebook running Windows 7, with MBR disk partitioning and legacy BIOS boot - I will not discuss GPT partitioning or EFI boot in this post. What I would like to do in this post is present a couple of simple examples of installing Linux for dual-booting on an existing Windows system. Every computer I own has 6 to 10 Linux distributions and occasionally Windows as well (although Windows is thankfully becoming less and less common on them). I suppose that is true, and I have to admit that I haven't contributed much to solving this issue in my blog, because every time I write about a Linux installer, I just sort of wave my hands at that part and say 'pay no attention to that man behind the curtain' because the partitioning on my systems is far too complicated to be used as an example. In the comments on my recent posts about installing Linux on a netbook for a novice user ( see my recommendations and my own results), someone mentioned that figuring out the disk partitioning was very difficult and particularly intimidating for new (or prospective) Linux users.

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