Dividing up a Hard Drive

timeout

Well simply put my mate has himself a 60G hard drive with winxp on it and a bunch of files/software/movies ect. The problem is that it is just all formated to the one 60G drive and no other partitions.

He wants to now put on Linux to screw around with, put does not want to lose what he has got. I got roped into finding out how to do this.

So any help welcomed cos I'm drawing a blank on how to do it and I'm sure that someone knows a quickfire way to do this.

Timeout

Eurorunner

I would recommend you use Acronis Partition Expert to resize the partition. I did the same thing last month on a xp pro machine with a view to making space for Linux - I used Partition Magic - and it crashed my machine. Apparently, there are issues with PM when it comes to resizing partitions.


Partition Expert Worked a treat


hth

Placebo

best would be to connect Your pc to your friends and transfer your file or transfer them to a cd and formatting

Cake Fiend

A lot of modern linux distros let you repartition your HD without losing data during the installation (make sure you have anything irreplaceable backed up just in case).

Reformatting is a stupid idea, there are plenty of ways to repartition your drive without losing the data on it.

timeout

I've downloaded partition Expert and Partition Magic. I'll try them out tonight and let you know how I get on.

Thanks
Timeout

pdogs

Partition Magic has always worked well for me and never caused me any data loss. However, whatever partitioning utility you are using, ENSURE you backup your partitions or data before you start - if the data is in anyway valuable.

Boberto

Partition Magic always worked for me... until i tried to resize my xp partition. BIG MISTAKE. It crashed halfway and left me with a corrupt partition. Had to reinstall everything again. In fairness, i needed an excuse to format but i'd never use PM again

fatmander

Most recent unix linux releases will let you resize your fat32 partition, not ntfs partitions.
The 3 main programs for resizing are
1/Ghost
2/Partition magic
3/Drive Image
They are all great programs, they all work, I have used all 3, and I have found ghost '03 to be the fastest.


Important: Only the latest version of each program will work with WINxp NTFS as the verion of NTFS on XP is different to all other releases, and this can destroy your partition otherwise

moridin

I'd agree with Boberto though, I've used PM in the past a number of times, and it does seem to be hit and miss whether it works or screws your machine up.

Didn't know Ghost did resizing, when'd that happen?

timeout

The Partition expert I got was a trial and would not perform any operations until you purchased it. So I went with partition magic and it worked fine. No problems, no data loss.

Thanks for the advise.
Timeout

Cake Fiend

The Mandrake 9.1 (a good distro for your first linux installation) installer for one can resize NTFS partitions. I'd imagine the newer versions of other popular distros also can.

fatmander

Ghost '03 resizes, new feature

mr_angry

I've done this several times before. I use Partition Magic 8.0, and I've never had any problems.

1. Resize your XP partition.
2. Insert the bootable Linux CD, and install.
3. Get up and running.

IMPORTANT: If you install Linux before XP, physically on the disk, and/or you receive a message saying "Windows cannot find hal32.dll - your system files are missing or corrupt", do not worry. The problem is that the boot menu file (C:\Boot.ini) now has the XP partition numbered incorrectly. This is not a disaster! Simply boot up Linux, find the Boot.ini file, and increment the number for the XP partition. Everything will return to normal, and you should be able to boot both Operating Systems correctly.

timeout

Installed Red Hat 8.0. Everything went fine. Had to do a full install cos my mate could not decide what he wanted. An easy install but it did take up alot of space. The boot sequence is run through LILO but both OSs work fine no conflicts or error messages.

DeadBankClerk

** BACK UP FIRST **

Polonious

Have to reiterate what DBC said - BACK UP FIRST!!! Or there could be tears!

pdogs

There are two groups of PC users; those that have lost data and those that will lose data. The former group (mostly) have learned the importance of backing up.

Capt'n Midnight

Ghost '03 resizes,Not a new feature

If you are going to mess around with the data on the drive
- check for errors (scandisk etc)
- defrag fully - so all the files at one end of the drive
- check for errors again.

other options - www.knoppix.net = linux on a bootable CD - so no messing with drive (also has partimage utility - but while it can compress an image doesn't do that with partitions)

Get another hard drive and boot from it - only needs to be a few gig .

Note if your existing partition is NTFS linux might have problems writing to it - FAT32 is better from that point of view.

Also have a look at the Unix forum for other utils.

Can anyone tell me if this works with XP ?
if you have a FAT32 partition - you may be able to copy files to another FAT32 partition on another drive, then run XP setup just long enough to make the new drive bootable !
NOTE: This works well with NT4 on a 2047MB FAT 16 partition
NB. This will not work if you move NT/2K/XP to a different type of PC

fatmander

Ghost '03 resizes, nope, not a hope
I was drunk(liar), I know it's no excuse...

What do you mean midnight? Copy the files to run setup, or just give you XP boot options by copying boot files directly, then booting off that drive?

Capt'n Midnight

I was asking to see if it worked - because I don't know.

But you can't just copy the boot files - they have to be installed (or fixed) at the very start of the drive (boot sector on active partition on first drive and all that)

Bottom line XP/2K are not designed to be copied or moved - so don't expect it to be easy.

If I get time I'll try during the week and let you know if it works...
I need to resize an XP partition and don't want to use Ghost cos of licencing...

pdogs

Can anyone tell me if this works with XP ? if you have a FAT32 partition - you may be able to copy files to another FAT32 partition on another drive, then run XP setup just long enough to make the new drive bootable !

You can copy the files - Yes. Or you can re-image them to another partition using such as PQ utilities.

In the latter case both the MBR and the Partition Tables will be updated and bootability restored. That is assuming the partition number is the same as the one in the original boot.ini file. That is easy to edit of course but you will get the hal.dll missing error if the partition reference is wrong.

In the former case (or in the latter case if there are any problems) boot from the WinXP CD and choose new installation but then choose to repair an existing partition (the one that you have copied over). The repair installation is different from repairing using the recovery console and from which you can run the fixboot and fixmbr commands; these may be helpful but can, ironically, also corrupt the boot processes in the presence of boot sector viruses or drive overlay software. A repair installation is safer.

The other thing to watch out for when doing any manual copying of this sort is that if you change the active partition for any reason other primary partitions may become hidden and throw out the references to the boot partition in boot.ini. Either edit boot.ini again or unhide the hidden partition to correct this.



PS Running the XP repair installation like this is generally fine - UNLESS you are repairing a preinstalled version of XP, when there can be problems.

Capt'n Midnight

recovery console - good point - RUN \i386\winnt32.exe /cmdcons
and then there is still the adventure game called SYSPREP
(unfortunately you can't save the level you have to start again if you get wiped out)