Ease of installation?

[Peter Hiscocks]

The problem usually is that the system was installed with one partition,
since that's the default for installing windows.  (It would be nice if
Microsoft would provide a spare partition, but that seems unlikely. ;).

Partition Magic is expensive, so I'd like to avoid that if possible. And
backing up the system is a nice idea, but unless you have a working
writeable CDROM on the system, it's really not practical. (I guess the
alternative would be to put in another hard drive.)

Defragging is not too much to ask - that's easy to do in advance of an
install. But moving the partitions around is the sticking point.

Anyway, I'll take a look at the Suse offering. Thanks for the suggestions.

Peter




On Fri, Feb 27, 2004 at 02:55:21PM -0500, SRB wrote:
> > The historic requirement has been to to defrag and then manually
> repartition
> > a hard drive in order to set up a dual-boot windows-linux system. I hear
> > rumours that some of the latest distros may be able to do this
> > semi-automatically. Could someone aware of the state of the art in this
> give
> > a summary of the current situation?
> 
> Depending on your situation, you can do the following (just recently did
> this myself):
> 
> 1. If your existing Windows system is on a SEPARATE partition (ie. you have
> more than one partition on your drive and Windows only occupies one of those
> partitions), you can easily use the Disk Management utility in XP/2000/NT to
> create an empty partition of the size you want for your new Linux
> installation (I picked 10GB for mine). Then I know from experience that if
> you install either Red Hat 9 or Fedora Core 1, it will detect that unused
> partition and allow you to select it for the install, in which case it will
> automatically sub-partition it to create a boot, root and swap partitions
> (still leaving around 9GB for your root files).
> 
> 2. If you need to modify the partition that contains your Windows system,
> you might need something like Partition Magic (commercial Windows software),
> but I'm not sure how reliable it is for modifying the main system partition.
> I'd suggest to patiently backup everything you need (take your time not to
> miss anything you may require later) and reinstall windows, then install
> linux. Important note, is that during windows install (XP/2000/NT), you'll
> want to delete your existing drive partitions and create a new partition
> that is NOT 100% size of the disk (again something like 10GB). Then install
> Windows here, and the extra unpartitioned space you can set up for Linux
> like in point #1.
> 
> I hope that helps a bit.
> 
> Just an FYI, the current setup I have on my drive is 10GB partition for
> Windows, 10GB partition for Linux (which was subdivided by Fedora into 3
> partitions: boot, root, and swap) and the remainder of my drive is set up as
> a FAT32 partition so that I can access files there from either OS.
> 
> -Steve.
> 
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-- 
Peter D. Hiscocks                         	   
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering    
Ryerson University,                    
350 Victoria Street,
Toronto, Ontario, M5B 2K3, Canada

Phone:   (416) 979-5000 Ext 6109
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Email:   phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org
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TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
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