Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2827 mails)

[David Bolt <bcrafhfr@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 14 Dec 2008, Carlos E. R. wrote:-

<snip>

> The other problem is that your first partition is not the windows
> partition. I don't know if that is viable.

That's not likely to be the problem, as I have a dual-boot and Windows
is on the second partition. In my case, the first partition is only
100MB, formatted as ext2, and is mounted as /boot. What's more likely to
be the problem is that the primary partition is after the extended
partition and that's confusing the Windows installer.

> I can think of two possible solutions: backup all your Linux things
> somewhere else, then erase the partition and let windows initialize the
> disk, then add Linux. The other is getting hold of partition magic (it
> is payware, but maybe your university has it) and do some shuffling
> around.

A third one, one you'd need to be very careful with, would be to use
fdisk to "move" the partitions.

First, you need to make a note of all the partitions on that drive,
along with the start, end and ID.

Second, delete the primary partitions. Any logical partitions inside an
extended partition will be deleted at the same time as the logical, so
there's no need to delete them as well.

Third, create the extended partition as partition 2 making sure you use
the correct values for the start and end.

Fourth, create the logical partitions in the same order. As above, make
sure you use the correct values for the start and end. Also, make sure
the partition IDs match.

Fifth, create the primary partition that will house Windows as partition
1. After the partition is made, fdisk will print a warning that the
partitions are "not in disk order", but won't prevent you writing the
partition table to disc.

Sixth, boot using the Windows installation CD and choose the correct
partition.

As an example of this is practice, here's a series of snapshots of me
doing the above using a virtual machine:

<URL:http://www.davjam.org/~davjam/images/moving_partitions.01.png>
<URL:http://www.davjam.org/~davjam/images/moving_partitions.02.png>
<URL:http://www.davjam.org/~davjam/images/moving_partitions.03.png>
<URL:http://www.davjam.org/~davjam/images/moving_partitions.04.png>
<URL:http://www.davjam.org/~davjam/images/moving_partitions.05.png>

And a couple after starting up my Windows XP installation CD:

<URL:http://www.davjam.org/~davjam/images/moving_partitions.06.png>
<URL:http://www.davjam.org/~davjam/images/moving_partitions.07.png>

> Ah, there is another method: run windows as a virtual machine under
> Linux, instead.

And there is a good idea.


Regards,
        David Bolt

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