My input to this matter would be to buy an extra harddrive an use ghost to copy/backup the old drive to it an then put the old drive in a safe place an work with the new drive. That way if you mess things up to bad you have not lost anything an can just drop in the old drive an up an running again. jack malone At 08:52 PM 4/10/2003 +0100, Vince Littler wrote:
On Thursday 10 April 2003 7:59 pm, pete atkinson wrote:
On Tue, 2003-04-08 at 18:51, pete atkinson wrote:
I have a manager at work who has expressed a desire to install 'Linux' on his home desktop pc.
He has Windows XP installed on his 'D:' drive and his 'C:' drive is bare.
What we know as hda1 (his c:) used to be win98 and hda2 (d:\) is XP. hdb1-hdb5 are data drives e:\ thro to i:\
when the install was running through its routine, all partition space on both drives was full so it was asking to shtink one of the two partitions on hda
He is reluctant to reformat the c: (hda1) as it will shift all his drive letters down by a degree.. (will it ?).
Forgive me I have no direct experience of XP, but I will spout on believing it boots the same as NT. If this is the case, then don't reformat C:, because it contains stuff inherent to the XP boot process. The situation would be recoverable, but given the questions you are asking, you would be on a learning curve with your manager's machine and I can think of many machines I would rather be on a learning curve with.....
If you do reformat C:, the drive letters will not shift, if XP recognises the partition type, but if you delete the partition, you will shift the letters
What you can do with C: is remove the old win95 stuff but leave the XP boot essentials and shrink that partition. In the space remaining you can insert a new non dos and non windows partition, which will not be seen by XP and will not adjust the drive letters. However, you might have to edit boot.ini to point to the correct partition for XP.
So he has agreed to re-arrange datawise his e-i: drives freeing a good 5gb (which I have suggested he uses fdisk to 'delete' He will then see if SuSE install will then identify the free space at the end of hdbx to install on.
This looks reasonable, but you will need to check out whether you can use a DOS partition [C:] as a linux boot as well as an XP boot. Myself, I have never gone that way, so you are on your own.
regards
Vince Littler
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