How to partition my drive to separate the OS and my files after installation?

Solution 1:

Usually, the best is to partition the drive during install, or, in your case, leave the partitions as they are and install Ubuntu on the partion where windows is (replace it).

By default, Ubuntu uses the whole disk for installation. In your case you should have done the installation steps untill you can choose "installation type" and choose "something else" there. Then remove the windows partition and create a swap partition of, let's say 1GB and an ext4 partition to install the system on (mountpoint /).

To make the existing data partition available in the newly installed system, select it (in the same window) and choose "Change" (next to +-); keep the same file system as it already is and give it mountpoint /data or something you like. Do NOT format the partition! That way it would have been as you planned.

In this situation you can choose: do a reinstall and a repartitioning, or just copy your existing data to /home/"yourname". You could of course resize the partition to be able to create your data partition, but it is more "clean" to reinstall; you just installed Ubuntu and probably did not do too much work afterwards. All should take no more than just 30 minutes.

here are a few links to screenshots:

choose "something else"

remove existing partitions:

create new partitions (in your case somthing like 1x 20GB for Ubuntu, 2gb for swap, the rest for /data (the picture shows adding the swap partition)

Start with the system partition, mountpoint /, then the data partition, /data, and finish with the swap partition. If you do it like that, Ubuntu will set the "type of the new partition" automatically correct.

and ready to install: `