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 ...

Automatic partitioning is safe and fast for standard installs—choose it if unsure. Manual partitioning is needed if you dual-boot, use LVM, or want separate filesystems for different partitions. Plan ...

As usual, this blog post comes out of something I have been working on (read as: struggling with) for the past few days. The purpose is to give an overview of disk partitioning under Linux, ...

Linux systems provide many ways to look at disk partitions. Here's a look at commands you can use to display useful information -- each providing a different format and with a different focus. Linux ...

In the beginning days of Unix and later Linux, disks were physically large, but very small in terms of storage capacity. A 300 megabyte disk in the mid-90’s was the size of a shoebox. Today, you can ...

Windows 10 isn’t the only (kind of) free operating system you can install on your computer. Linux can run from just a USB drive without modifying your existing system, but you’ll want to install it on ...

We've walked through how to triple-boot your Mac with Windows and Linux, but if you're using a shiny new Hackintosh, the process is a bit more complicated. Here's how to get all three operating ...

Not too long ago, a friend sent me an e-mail that said, "I want to ask for a favor and see if you can help me to recover the data in the hard disk of my daughter's PC." I came to learn that some ...

Loading up virtual machines is an easy to accomplish task, but configuring them properly is an ongoing balancing act. It’s very likely that in a virtualized environment you will over/under provision ...

Lack of access to your data in a new operating system may be one of the most severe impediments for doing an OS migration. There is little personal incentive for users to switch to a system that can't ...