Op 26-10-12 16:58, George Olson schreef:
On Monday, October 22, 2012 01:12:05 PM JtWdyP wrote:
From my last post: The challenge is that your system is already using all 4 primary partitions. I have a friend that recently had to make a dual boot Windows/Linux pc in exactly that same situation. He found a tool that allowed him to convert a primary partition into an extended partition, and this freed up the hard drive to be able to create the necessary partitions for installing the Linux OS.
I don't know what that tool was, but I have an email out to him and as soon as he gets back to me I will post again here. That way you can simply convert a partition to an extended partition and you won't have to delete your restore partition. Hope you can hold out a little longer until I am able to get that information - I am very pleased with my system and the dual boot capabilities.
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I got the email back from my friend and he said that he wasn't sure which tool he used to convert primary to extended. Here is what he said:
I just did a search I think for "convert primary partition extended win 7". I think it was this one, http://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html. It was over a year ago and I no longer remember the name of the program. I know it worked, and it was harder than you were thinking. The first primary partition was the windows 7 boot partition. The second was big and was the windows 7 system partition. The 3rd was diagnostics, and the 4th was a recovery partition. I needed to convert the 2 partition to extended and shrink it, all while not breaking windows 7, to make room for 3 logical drives for Linux.
I also found this link that might be a better option: http://www.partitionwizard.com/convertpartition/primary-or-extended- partition.html
George
This is exactly the problem. If one pre configures a partition in W7, the possibilities to create an extended or logical partition are gone. Because of that, Linux will never recognize that partition as such, and qparted is not able to change that, because it has to be created from a primary partition that is boot-able. Therefore qparted will always suggest to shrink the windows partition, and create an extended partition on that primary partition. From windows marking an empty partition boot-able is not doable. You can say that W7 makes it harder to dual with any Linux distro. I noticed that recently, and what i did was: Throw away the partition i had created for 121, format ntfs, and extended the c partition to cover the complete space i wanted to use for both. Than i waited for the proposal from 121, and tried lvm, which i never used before, with option separate /home. It will create a /boot 150MB, ext4 (was always ext2) /swap 2GB, and suggest / and /home, all ext4 dependable on available space. This was last week. 3 days ago i wanted to install 122. Now i ignored any proposition and imported the partiontable. I used the exact same config, and formatted /121 to use for 122. The mistake i made was to not format /home, i had to to that afterward, because 122, is not backwards compatible with 121. I thought something was not right with122, so created a new user. This user was completely usable, and the new system ran nice and snappy. Than i decided to delete my old user and his /home. Afterward i created the same user again, because i want to use that name. I lost all my data due to an installation error. G-Parted Live was not able to save any of the installs that were on the drive before the 'accident', and also not to create an extended partition. If you have all partitions in use, you will have to use Partition Magic to shrink, move, delete, or create the space you want to use for Linux. Sometimes the most easy thing is to move all data temporary to an external hdd, because it is much easier to start with as little as possible data on the drive you want to partition. Best thing to do is to shrink W7 before you do anything else, than all data is at the beginning of the drive , and you know the room W7 calculates for the space she thinks she will use. Than extend to as many space you want to make extended. All other partitions have to be thrown away best, formatted ntfs, and extended to a big 'c'. Than fire up 122 and look at the proposals, or create whatever you want. 10GB for / is OK. 2GB for /swap is OK, 200MB for /boot is OK. If you want to use many different Linux versions/distro/s, it might be wise to create a separate /temp, to be used/mounted by all distros/version of say 5GB, to be able to download a complete update before installing, but is not necessary, and not at all if more than 4GB Ram is present, and 2GB /swap. A lot of words, i agree, but necessary if you want practical info from a real situation. I always used many distro's and versions on one PC, sometimes more hdd's, but all boot-able and usable. Her on this eee pc 901, i extended the Ram to 2GB (max.) and replaced the 16GB SSD, with 64GB SSD. I always had XP dual two openSUSE versions: 112, 113, 114 and 121, so always a working install, when testing a new version. W7 needs much more room: 30GB instead of 20GB. So now i have only W7 and one oS: first 121, last week, and now 122. W7 installed alright, and i was able to install the acpi drivers with the backwards compatibility option, (troubleshoot in control panel), also the Fn Function keys were made completely functional that way. This hardware is up to W7 for sure. (Please just ignore not relevant info..) Kind Regards, -- Have a nice day, Oddball. OS: Linux 3.7.0-rc2-1-desktop i686 Huidige gebruiker: oddball@EeePc-Rob-SFN9 Systeem: openSUSE 12.2 (i586) KDE: 4.8.5 (4.8.5) "release 2" -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org