Hi Again, with repeat apologies!
The laptop on which I propose to install Linux has Windows Vista Home Premium pre-installed.
There is one hard drive: 120GB. Partition info according to Vista is:
Vista (C:) 91.2GB free, 104GB total System (S:) 1.41GB free, 1.46GB total
Gentoo finds the HD at /dev/sda, and fdisk gives:
/dev/sda1 Start=1 End=702 Blocks=5,632,000 ID=27 Type=Unknown
/dev/sda2 Start=702 End=893 Blocks=1,536,000 ID=7 Type=HP/NTFS
/dev/sda3 Start=893 End=14894 Blocks=110,050,304 ID=7 Type=HP/NTFS
Presumably (matching on partition size) /dev/sda2 is the 1.4GB "System" partition which Vista identified (dunno what that's for, though; but at least it's a known filesystem type). And of course /dev/sda3 is the Big One, which Vista has all to itself.
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.
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".
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. Also, will the fact that the partitions do not begin and end on cylinder boundaries (see above fdisk info) matter?
So I'd welcome experienced advice about these and any related issues that need taking care of when installing Linux alongside Vista.
With thanks, Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 26-Aug-07 Time: 20:51:22 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
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
Ted
Vista comes with its own disk management. Go into the control panel and click Admin Tools and then Computer Management. Under Storage look at Disk Management and there you "see" the disk layout. You can grab the end of the partition which Vista is on and then make it smaller by dragging it to the left. ( names from XP but IIRC its the same on Vista )
This IMHO is the best bit of Vista !!!!! :)
Looking at the sizes of the partitions I would recon that sda1 has the utilities to reformat the drive and install the drivers, etc sda2 has the compressed image of Vista to "reinstall" or "factory reset" sda3 is vista ( as you said )
I would copy sda2 to DVD and this will allow you to manually re-install Vista when M$ is getting tired.
Ubuntu v7.something Feisty Fawn will read but not write ( as default ) the NTFS partition. I would recommend copying the boot sector of sda to a safe location ( even floppy ) as Vista is a bitch to get the boot sector back if something goes very wrong. My Dell came with the partition but no backup disks, but I eventually got some disks through the post.
I have not used GenToo, so I'm not replying to the other email chain. I've used loads of *nix ( SunOS, Solaris 2.4 to 9, RedHat 4.2 to RH9, PuppyLinux, DSL and Ubuntu ) and helped with others. I'm happy when I can run FireFox, have a CLI and no bloatware, where I think RH has now gone.
Just finished upgrading my dual-boot laptops disk. I used a Ghost 2003 booting CD to copy the NTFS partition to a USB drive (320G) and then partition the new drive and copy the partition back, going from 30G to 60G and then install FF and alter grub to boot both OS's. NOTE: after FF upgrades over the internet it looses the M$ entry so make a backup of the changes under /boot/grub. NOTE2: do grub-install /dev/hda NOT on a partition.
HTH Keith
On 27-Aug-07 05:53:02, keith.jamieson@bt.com wrote:
Ted
Vista comes with its own disk management. Go into the control panel and click Admin Tools and then Computer Management. Under Storage look at Disk Management and there you "see" the disk layout. You can grab the end of the partition which Vista is on and then make it smaller by dragging it to the left. ( names from XP but IIRC its the same on Vista)
This IMHO is the best bit of Vista !!!!! :)
At last an excellent idea from that quarter!
It's slightly different on Vista from what you describe, The same down to
Control Panel --> Admin Tools --> Computer Management --> Storage --> Disk Management
At this point you indeed see a display of disk layout. But as far as I can tell there's no facility to "drag the end of the partition". Instead, if you right-click on the partition you get a menu, one option of which is "Shrink Volume".
Also, another option is "Help", and for once I found the explanations to be pretty clear! In the past M$ has been notorious, in my book, for the crappiest help imaginable!
In particular, it makes clear what your scope for resizing will be (in relation, e.g., to the location of "fixed" files, and what to do about it if you need to move their locations).
Looking at the sizes of the partitions I would recon that sda1 has the utilities to reformat the drive and install the drivers, etc sda2 has the compressed image of Vista to "reinstall" or "factory reset" sda3 is vista (as you said)
Vista "bullied" me into making a Recovery DVD, which apparently contains 3GB of data (C:, the Vista drive, has 91.2GB free out of 104GB, so ca. 12GB used).
Allegedly, sda2 (the small 1.46GB one) is empty.
I would copy sda2 to DVD and this will allow you to manually re-install Vista when M$ is getting tired.
Ubuntu v7.something Feisty Fawn will read but not write (as default) the NTFS partition. I would recommend copying the boot sector of sda to a safe location ( even floppy ) as Vista is a bitch to get the boot sector back if something goes very wrong. My Dell came with the partition but no backup disks, but I eventually got some disks through the post.
In the old days, making a copy of the boot sector was a simple
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/floppy bs=512 count=1
(or whatever the devices might be); the point being that it was the first 512 physical bytes on the drive.
Is that still the case?
Sorry about all these questions, but a) I'm feeling wary of this new (Vista) territory; b) Messing withh a laptop is all-or-nothing. At least on a desktop, if you want to try things out, you can strap in a spare HDD, dd from the "real" one to the spare, take out the "real" one and put the spare in its place, and then suk it and see.
But many thanks for a wide-ranging and revealing explanation! Ted.
PS I've reckoned since a long time ago (1992) that the biggest mistake M$ made was not going straight for NT. They were already developing NT in 1990/1, and according to info available at the time, as an OS it would have given the PC a good approximation to the power and flexibility of Unix (subject to decent applications being available).
On the other hand DOS (and the versions of Windows riding on DOS) amounted to a ball and chain on the ankles of capable hardware.
Even so, you could do surprising things with a suitable "layer" between the apps and the OS -- remember QuarterDeck and DesqView, anyone? This used paging techniques (64K at a time) to simulate multitasking. Slow, but it worked -- Once, as a test, I set a puny machine (40MB HDD, 1MB RAM) to draw a complicated diagram from a database using AutoCad, while I typed up a document in WordStar.When I'd finished typing, I switched back to the AutoCad "console" and there was the diagram on a VGA screen. It was a long time before M$ got round to that sort of thing.
If NT had come out in 1992, it might have been a very serious competitor to Linux. But NT didn't hit the "consumer" market until last year -- 15 years late.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 27-Aug-07 Time: 10:04:05 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
On Mon, Aug 27, 2007 at 10:04:23AM +0100, Ted Harding wrote:
If NT had come out in 1992, it might have been a very serious competitor to Linux. But NT didn't hit the "consumer" market until last year -- 15 years late.
Windows XP came out in 2001 (and was in reality what Windows 2000 was supposed to be when that came out), I make that 6 years ago ;)
Adam
On Mon, 2007-08-27 at 10:04 +0100, ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
In the old days, making a copy of the boot sector was a simple
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/floppy bs=512 count=1
(or whatever the devices might be); the point being that it was the first 512 physical bytes on the drive.
Is that still the case?
Yes but to be honest the best way of protecting yourself is to have bootable recovery media available, because there are plenty of other reasons for the OS not booting than the contents of the boot sector being corrupted. For Vista I would look at options of how you can make the recovery console available without (presumably) having "proper" installation media supplied with your Laptop. As well as being able to fix a stuffed boot sector you can recover from a stuffed registry etc from here (although the same is true from knoppix)
PS I've reckoned since a long time ago (1992) that the biggest mistake M$ made was not going straight for NT. They were already developing NT in 1990/1, and according to info available at the time, as an OS it would have given the PC a good approximation to the power and flexibility of Unix (subject to decent applications being available).
You have to remember that this was a time of great confusion over future direction at MS, they had started with Xenix which was intended to be the way forward, then OS/2 as a joint development with IBM was going to be the way forward (there are even quotes around from Billy G stating that Windows is a dead end and OS/2 is the way forward) Then MS got Dave Cutler, realised that they didn't need IBM anymore and Cutler designed the first released version of NT (Windows NT 3.1) in 1993 which was more or less a hybrid of ideas taken from VMS and OS/2..given the confusion at the time any earlier release wouldn't have been NT it would have been OS/2 (in fact up until 1991 MS were still working on OS/2 3.0)
If NT had come out in 1992, it might have been a very serious competitor to Linux. But NT didn't hit the "consumer" market until last year -- 15 years late.
I'd say that NT hit the consumer market in 2002 when XP was the default installation on almost every new machine sold.
The intention was that this would have been so with Windows 2000 as that was originally designed to be "the one true os", possibly with a cut down version as per XP/Vista Home. Unfortunately MS were very late getting the final API out to driver developers for consumer things like gaming controllers etc. So at the point of release there was next to no support for consumer devices.
At this point MS panicked and cobbled together Windows ME
Previous to that there were some architectural issues I believe as to why NT could not have full DirectX support (beyond the version 3 that was included) Given how MS had pushed out DirecX to game developers, releasing a consumer OS that only had accelerated 3D support using OpenGL would have been a bit of a shot in the foot.
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/floppy bs=512 count=1
(or whatever the devices might be); the point being that it was the first 512 physical bytes on the drive.
Yes, I forgot about this one.
b) Messing withh a laptop is all-or-nothing. At least on a desktop, if you want to try things out, you can strap in a spare HDD, dd from the "real" one to the spare, take out the "real" one and put the spare in its place, and then suk it and see.
With the laptops you can boot off USB devices. I have several booting sticks, M$ and DSL/ puppy Linux. The drive I removed from the laptop and put into the USB enclosure was "seen" as a boot device - thats one drive inside and one outside. Use USB2 as I had an 80G IDE backing up via a USB1.1 and it took 15 hours !!!!!
But many thanks for a wide-ranging and revealing explanation! Ted.
Cheers, glad to help. I know I need help sometimes - mostly after several pints ;) Keith