[Techtalk] Dualboot on my laptop

[David Sumbler]

On Thu, 7 Aug 2003, Rebecca Jones wrote:

> I've finally decided to stop hemming and hawing and go ahead and
> turn my laptop into a dual boot machine.  I keep sitting on my hands
> saying I need to learn more before I do anything drastic.  Besides,
> *needing* to fix whatever I break will be great incentive to finish
> learning.  ;-) The only problems is the sucky recovery disk type
> they give with it.  (As discussed in an earlier thread) I saw the
> below quote in that thread and it sounded too good to be true.
> 
> Start quote .....
> 
> Check out http://www.mondorescue.org  Mondoarchive is a full featured backup 
> and disaster recovery system.  It will bare-metal restore any (linux, BSD, 
> MSwin) system from CD, NFS server, tape...  It handles NTFS partitions by 
> doing a "ghost" image since it cannot write individual  files there.  The 
> current devel branch has code to image only the  _data-filled_ parts of the 
> NTFS partition thus reducing the image size.
> 
> Using mondoarchive to back up your newly installed XP, after you
> install linux also, will allow you to do the equivalent of the
> "restore" CD[0] without losing the linux stuff...
> 
> end quote ...
> 
> I checked out the site and it looks like you need to already have Linux 
> installed on the machine to make this work.  I also found this thread in the 
> forum .... 
> http://forum.mondorescue.org/viewtopic.php?t=41&sid=8a1ba8ccf58b6569f5d4d3845aca02c1
> Conor, if you're out there - let me know if I'm wrong.  I'll be one happy, 
> happy girl if I can get this to work.  I do have RH 9 on my desktop if that 
> helps.  
> 
> Thanks for any assistance you guys can give!

Sounds to me as if all your problems are solved!  :-) I have a WinMe
system with only a "sucky recovery disk".  I used fips.exe to reduce
the size of the Windows partition (because the recovery thing takes
over the whole disc), added a few more partitions in the space
recovered, then installed Linux.

I hadn't come across Mondorescue until today, but you (and I!) need to
install it after Linux is working, and then we can even restore the
Windows stuff.

David

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