[Techtalk] Re: [prog] FW: Running XP and Linux

Sabine Konhaeuser sjmk at gmx.net
Sat Feb 28 09:26:10 EST 2004


On Saturday 28 February 2004 04:58, Rasjid Wilcox wrote:
> On Saturday 28 February 2004 14:51, E. K. Lua wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I just bought a laptop, Pentium IV 2.0 GHz, with 768MB RAM, and
> > 30 GB Harddisk.  It was installed with Microsoft XP HOME, and the
> > harddisk is not partitioned, so I am unable to install Linux OS.
> >
> > Please could someone help to advise if I do not wish to erase the
> > current Windows XP (since some of the software has been installed
> > and I don't have their software CDs),i.e. to keep the current
> > Windows XP, and be able to install Linux and perhaps do a Dual
> > Boot.  I understand there's this PartitionMagix... Is this good?
> >
> > I need some urgent help here, as I couldn't proceed further...
>
> Not an open-source solution, but I can recommend BootIt NG from
> TeraByte Unlimited.  The software is shareware, and can be
> downloaded free of charge.
> http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootitng.html.  It is a small
> download and boots off either a floppy or a CD (the CD image
> requires a CD writer of course).
> The main trick with BootIt NG is when it says "Welcome to Setup. 
> Click the OK button to install BootIt NG to the hard drive" click
> **CANCEL**. This will put you into maitainence mode, and you run
> the partition editor from there.
>
> For open-source solutions, I believe that Mandrake has inbuilt NTFS
> resizing as part of its install.  Other distros probably have it
> now too.  I don't know how well they work, as I have not used them.
>  I have used the NTFS resizing feature of the SystemRescueCD.  I
> noticed some odd things in the filesystem after that, although they
> might have been there already.  I didn't check first.  :-(

BootIT NG is good. It will resize your partition the way you want. You 
also can use Partition Magic if you can get a hand on it. The 
mandrake tool will not be able to shrink your partition as much as 
you want. I tried it with SuSE's and Mandrake's tool and got down 
only to about 14GB (30 GB drive). With BootITNG I could resize to 9 
GB (what I wanted). If you don't want a dual boot, don't bother, just 
wipe out the XP partition in total - that should work with any distro 
you plan on using. I don't know if you need the space in the 
beginning of the drive - it's save to keep and it's small.

Before you resize you need to prepare WinXP, otherwise you won't get 
that far either. Boot into XP, go to the control panel and power 
management (not sure what it says exactly). Turn OFF hibernation and 
turn OFF the virtual memory allocation. You should turn that back on 
afterwards. Reboot to make sure it sticks. I went a step further and 
unistalled all the stuff I didn't need. Then, run WinXP's defrag 
tool. Go to My Computer, right click on HDD icon, go to tools and 
then defrag. I did it twice, just to be sure. Why all that: turning 
off hibernation and the virtual memory will remove un-movable areas. 
Defragmenting will move the files towards the beginning of the disk. 
You will have far less risk to damage your files.

Now boot again and use BooitNG and off you go. If you don't have a 
floppy on your laptop, you need to create a bootable CD. The program 
let's you do that. Easiest thing is to do that on your desktop, which 
probably has a floppy drive. Create the floppy and then burn the 
bootable CD. Since you are in resize mode, you might want to add a 
partition both OSes can write on for shared documents.

I did resize the XP partition on my laptop just like I described above 
and both Linux and WinXP work fine

Cheers,
-- 
Sabine


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