On Sun, 2007-08-26 at 20:51 +0100, ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
And Vista does not see /dev/sda1 at all. This may be something to do with machine boot-up, BIOS config, diagnostics, or the like.
Probably, I've seen that sort of thing before.
Anyway, my real question is to do with backing Vista into a much smaller corner of /dev/sda3. Perhaps I'll be benign and let it have as much as 40GB to run around in, maybe less, however.
So this means resizing the /dev/sda3 partition, and adding new partiitions in the space released. There shouldn't be problems with the latter, once the former has been done.
But this is the first time I've been anywhere near an NTFS filesystem. While I've done this often enough for DOS/VFAT systems, I don't really know what sort of animal NTFS is, and how kindly it would take to being "downsized".
*Resizing* NTFS under Linux is very reliable (as I understand), and I have never had any problems with it. It is writing data to NTFS that has always been a problem as opposed to just moving it about (although the new ntfs-3g driver seems to do a very good job of full NTFS write support).
Still less do I know what tool I should use for the resizing, what dangers to watch out for (I don't really want to zap Vista, since it sould come in handy sometime), nor whether the Linux bootloader )e.g. GRuB) will work smoothly with this setup.
ntfsresize is the tool that can be used to reliably resize the partition, although Ubuntu will do the resizing for you on installation if you want. I let Ubuntu do the resizing on a friend's laptop and it worked fine.
The alternative is to get a live CD such as Knoppix or SystemRescueCd and do the resizing with that using QtParted or GParted. I used QtParted to resize several dozen production servers with no problems whatsoever!
Also, will the fact that the partitions do not begin and end on cylinder boundaries (see above fdisk info) matter?
Not sure, I wouldn't have thought so.
So I'd welcome experienced advice about these and any related issues that need taking care of when installing Linux alongside Vista.
I have no experience of Gentoo, but if you're using Ubuntu I would just crack on and let the installer do the work.
Regards,
Andy Beverley