On Saturday 08 October 2005 09.48, Aschwin Marsman wrote:
It's XP that came for "free" (M$ tax) with the laptop. Is it sufficient to create a VFAT partition of the same size on the new disc?
I doubt so. First, AFAIK, XP turns FAT to NTFS when first started - but maybe not always? If so, I don't know how parted handles NTFS. Second, if you just copy everything, it won't boot. It won't boot either if it does not consider to be the first and only primary partition (but as Windows knows nothing of ext2/3 you may have other Linux primary partitions). One thing I did to preserve such a "free" XP on a notebook was: - shrink the partition with some tool so that it can fit on a DVD - create a second partition with linux - booting from a live CD (Mepis or Knoppix for example) create an image of the partition (dd if=<source> of=/<path>/image) and burn it to a DVD getting it back and booting involved: - creating a partition and installing a bootable Windows (I used w2k for that) - copy the stuff back from the DVD with dd Not being a user of XP (I just tested if my flight simulator would owrk on the laptop) I don't know if there are other means to make a partition bootable for Windows. Thierry -- The problem with the world is stupidity. Not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself? Frank Zappa