On Thursday 16 November 2006 19:14, you wrote:
Ok! I do not own partition magic, are there any reliable foss solutions for the problem?
Since I do not have any windows installations I do not want to do away with this factory install, I want to tinker with the beast. I have been windows free since 1998. Due respects to rudolf... but NTFS is not supported (well its supported in read only mode) and the shrinking software on the system I setup for my daughter clobbered the NTFS partition... end of story.
I had a similar problem with my daughter's HP s7400n slimline system that we setup for college. She wanted to keep the XP partition (just in case) to tinker with it, or in case she ran into a situation at the college where something would only *work* there... anyway, she mostly does Suse 10 and has never needed the partition, but I will relay the story just the same. As stated earlier the shrinking software *did not* handle the partition correctly and it would not bootup again. Fortunately for her, HP provides a backup partition that can be loaded from bios that will restore the factory preload in case of catastrophe... and that worked fine. What I did for her was to format the shrunk partition and then install Suse 10 on the remainer of the drive. Then I used DD to save the MBR to a file. Then I reinstalled the factory software from the backup partition, and then restored the Linux MBR. This all worked fine. As it turned out... she is now M$ free as well and has finally lost her paranoia about *maybe* needing windoze... so it was a lot of work for nothing... she is happily writing papers with OpenOffice, emailing with Thunderbird, and Surfing with Firefox... and she has *never* had a system crash yet... Go for it... wipe out the XP partition... you'll never miss it. Oh, by the way, did I mention that her factory preloaded software from HP was almost entirely a marketing gig????? Yeah, most of the system was a teaser... try this for a while then download the real thing for some more BIG bucks... and most of it (except the lame windoze games) come preloaded and fully functional in Suse 10. Go ahead... tinker with it... then blow it away. -- Kind regards, M Harris <>< -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org