On Sat, 13 Sep 2003 10:16:59 +0100 (BST) (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
Qs: Will I be treading on any toes on this front by cutting back the disk space to the first 2GB in this way? Or will Win98, next time it starts up, simply do its usual swap thing in the space it then finds available? If there would be problems, what should be done to avoid them?
A few years ago I found that repartitioning windows led to no nasty surprises though this was a desktop installation. I did it with partition magic though think you should look at parted as I have heard that its a good tool, although do NOT resize a partition when its mounted.
from man
parted is a disk partitioning and partition resizing program. It allows you to create, destroy, resize, move and copy ext2, ext3, linux- swap, FAT and FAT32 partitions. This is useful for creating space for new operating systems, reorganising disk usage, and copying data to new hard disks.
Q: I believe that one of the options is "hibernate to disk", where the system state is saved somewhere on the HDD. This is a similar issue to number 1: what toes would I be treading on?
You may find a swap to hibernate partition, this is what I found on Windows 2000 on a work laptop. Fdisk was a little misleading in this area. I cant remember the details.
Q: There is also a converse issue: If I fail to set up the Linux partitions properly, and the laptop writes its system state out to disk when it wants to sleep, could this overwrite something that shouldn't be overwritten? Again, if there could be problems, what should be done to avoid them?
I didnt find this a problem, I just broke Windows.
I strongly recommend getting 6GB of disk space somewhere and using dd to copy the original disk.
I have used
ssh remote.machine dd if=/dev/hda | dd of=backupfile.image
for similar purposes in the past. I use a knoppix CD as a rescue system. (it has ssh unlike toms root and boot)
regards
Owen