Re-partitioning with OS not on a CD

[twoHats]

Hi All ... I just got an HP Pavillion a1250n ( a very good deal on a really hot machine - check Circuit City) and it came with Windoze XP Media Center. Of course, i want to put Linux on it ASAP. The problem is that the OS is only on HD partition.

My idea is to repartition the active partition - then do a Recovery operation onto a small partition to get M$ back so i can play with the toys for a while, and put Linux on one of the other partitions (got dome 64bit linux on the way!)

Anyone have experience with these "on drive" OS backups?

Thanks

PS the machine = Athlon64 x2 - 1G ram - 250G SATA HD plus more high speed ports than you can shake a stick at.

[Stefann]

OK, here is what you do, delete the partition windows is installed on, and make the following partitions
Start of disk to 50MB - /boot
50MB to whatever - windows
now make a partiton equal to twice the amount of RAM in your machine, but at most 1GB large, this will be the Linux SWAP partition
end of swap to recovery partiton / this is where linux will be installed

Now install windows on its partition, than install linux, you must do this in that order. After that have fun.

Most BIOSes won't boot anything past 1024 cylinders on the hard disk so the /boot and windows partition must be where I described, this way GRUB can still load the kernel ramdisk and can then boot the system, and the microsoft bootloader installed at the start of the windows partition can be loaded.

[pavlo_7]

Why not to try resizing (shrink) windows partition, and then install Linux in the free space?

[Stefann]

Why not to try resizing (shrink) windows partition, and then install Linux in the free space?

How many times do I have to tell you people, most modern versions of windows use NTFS and even tough partition magic resizes it pretty well, the danger of messing it up is always there.

[twoHats]

Stefan - Thanks - but i have no way to do the last step of installing windoze - no windows cd! So i am glad i am not a nubie, or i might have wiped my OS and been left with nothing.

Why not to try resizing (shrink) windows partition, and then install Linux in the free space?

pavlo_7:

I have done just that. Probably didn't do it right, but it seemed as tho it might work

booted in Knoppix - from the cl ran fdisk - deleted the big partition, added back a partition larger than what was needed.

All seemed fine - but when i rebooted, iwindoze didn't come up - so i did the Restore option, and sure enough - the damn thing repartitioned the HD back to the wauy it was. Arrrrggggggg - i may have to give up on windoze... and i know i paid for it!

If you have another way that will leave the windoze part of the partition intact (so i won't have to do the restore) i would really appreciate hearing about it!

Windoze is nay Scottish!

Thanks for the responses -

[budman7]

The restore cd will always set the pc back to factory settings. That is just one partition.

After installing Windows, then you just have one big partition.
Now bootup with the knoppix cd, bring up a "root terminal", type "qtparted". Now you can resize the windows partition and create new partitions.
If you want to just dual boot, you should create 2 additional partitions.
One for the Linux OS, and one for data. Make the data partition Fat32 so both Linux and Windows will be able to read and write to it.

With a GB of ram, you shouldn't need to bother with a swap partition.

[Stefann]

Stefan - Thanks - but i have no way to do the last step of installing windoze - no windows cd! So i am glad i am not a nubie, or i might have wiped my OS and been left with nothing.

Why not to try resizing (shrink) windows partition, and then install Linux in the free space?

pavlo_7:

I have done just that. Probably didn't do it right, but it seemed as tho it might work

booted in Knoppix - from the cl ran fdisk - deleted the big partition, added back a partition larger than what was needed.

All seemed fine - but when i rebooted, iwindoze didn't come up - so i did the Restore option, and sure enough - the damn thing repartitioned the HD back to the wauy it was. Arrrrggggggg - i may have to give up on windoze... and i know i paid for it!

If you have another way that will leave the windoze part of the partition intact (so i won't have to do the restore) i would really appreciate hearing about it!

Windoze is nay Scottish!

Thanks for the responses -

Bizzare, I can only recommend using Partition Magic from Norton to resize the partition because of the ****** restore software your OEM gave you, why can't they give people REAL install media??? To lock us into M$ only so we have to give them more money for us to install linux!!! Maybe its really true.

[twoHats]

The restore cd will always set the pc back to factory settings. That is just one partition.

After installing Windows, then you just have one big partition.
Now bootup with the knoppix cd, bring up a "root terminal", type "qtparted". Now you can resize the windows partition and create new partitions.
If you want to just dual boot, you should create 2 additional partitions.
One for the Linux OS, and one for data. Make the data partition Fat32 so both Linux and Windows will be able to read and write to it.

With a GB of ram, you shouldn't need to bother with a swap partition.

Well ... unfortunately i don't have an install cd - also unfortunately - i couldn't wait and went and resized my drive with qtparted. Now i have no more windoze problems ... or windoze for that matter

I guess i'll try Fedora 4 ...

Thanks for the replies all

[twoHats]

Bizzare, I can only recommend using Partition Magic from Norton to resize the partition because of the ****** restore software your OEM gave you, why can't they give people REAL install media??? To lock us into M$ only so we have to give them more money for us to install linux!!! Maybe its really true.

Hi Stefann - came across a tool on linux to resize ntfs partitions - it is called, oddly enough, ntfsresize - on knoppix 4.02 there was a man page for it and everything!

So.... I guess you won't have to tell people about ntfs anymore except to say


ntfsresize


Thanks for the responses -

[pavlo_7]

twoHats:
I'm glad you found the way to resize it.

Well ... unfortunately i don't have an install cd - also unfortunately - i couldn't wait and went and resized my drive with qtparted. Now i have no more windoze problems ... or windoze for that matter I guess i'll try Fedora 4 ...

came across a tool on linux to resize ntfs partitions - it is called, oddly enough, ntfsresize - on knoppix 4.02 there was a man page for it and everything!

Now, when you install Fedora, you will be able to configure bootloader to get a dual boot menu where you will have a choice of booting either windows (assuming you just resized it, not deleted) or Linux.