[techtalk] windows sucks

[Conor Daly]

On Mon, May 21, 2001 at 09:07:45PM -0400 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
coldfire thought:
> question entailing windows ... baffles me.  i hope someone can shed some
> light.
> 
> 6gb laptop had windows installed on it .. i wanted linux, so i booted with
> some linux bootdisks, designed a nice partition table, wrote the changes,
> and then i recovered windows with the recovery cd.
> 
> however, windows recognizes the 2.2gb partition it is on as the whole 6gb
> hard drive.  any way to get windows to recognize that it doesn't own my
> entire hard drive?
You could boot from the linux install CD, get to the Partitioning point
and remake the partitions *exactly* as you did when installing linux the
first time (you could post the output from 'fdisk -l /dev/hda' at this
point).  If you can't remember those details, you might need to do the
linux install again, copy the partition table to a floppy using the 'dd'
command (I don't know which sectors you need to copy, someone else might
advisae on this).  Use your Windows "recovery" CD, boot linux from floppy
and use 'dd' to restore the partition table.  If that doesn't work, do
something like:

1. Use the Windows recovery CD to install on the *entire* HD
2. If the resulting partition is more than 2,2Gb, use fips to split the 
   partition for linux.  Otherwise, you should be able to use linux fdisk
   to make new linux partitions without disturbing the windows partition.
3. Install liunx in the remaining ~4Gb
4. Use 'dd; in linux to make an image of the windows partition 
   (dd if=/dev/hda1 of=windows.img) and put that on a CD.
5. Use that as your windows "recovery" CD by using 'dd' to put it back on
   the HD

Yes, I *know* 2.2Gb won't fit on a CDROM but you should be able to gzip
the image into less than 640Mb and then use 'zcat' to restore it.

Conor
-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net>

Domestic Sysadmin :-)
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