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, 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.