How long to partition?

[mryikes]

I've been attempting to install for 4 hours. Ubuntu is writing a bunch of gibberish to the swap partition. I went back and tried to cancel, but scanning partitions took 30 minutes. I would now want to install without partitions, but do not know how to do that and I do not know how to clean out what Ubuntu has written. Undo changes to partitions has been working for one hour. I do not understand where/how to partition root file. I am willing.
I can get to step 4 of partition, but that is all.
compaq evo n610c, no OS, Ubuntu on CD

[MikeTbob]

Hello and Welcome.
Can you get the LiveCD to boot? If so, then boot it up and issue this command please. It will show us your hard drive structure and what is up with your partitions.

sudo fdisk -l

That's a lowercase L not a 1. Post your results back here.
Ideally, if you do not have another operating system on your HD then you would just delete all partitions and let the installer create all new ones for you. It should not take more than 45 minutes to an hour to get the whole CD installed.

[mryikes]

Thank you for responding.
I do not have a liveCD option of ubuntu.
I loaded another linux distro and deleted the partitions.
Linuxpcos and Freespire worked, Fedora and Susie had an error.
Trying to install ubuntu again, it is formating swap partition #5, but I can tell it is repeating the gibberish.
I do not know how to get fdisk info and get it to you.

[MikeTbob]

Most distros have a LiveCD function, reboot the machine with the distro in the drive and press enter when you see the bootup screen......just run the CD/DVD from the drive and open a terminal window to issue those commands.

[nujinini]

I helped partition the HDs of some friends and they were quite impressed with gparted. I guess you might want to try it out too. I humbly suggest.

You can get a USB of it here if you may want to.

Good luck!