Max Lemieux wrote:
> Regarding laptops, I've been unable to use the OEM WinXP System Recovery
> CD for this Vaio since creating new partitions on the drive. This was a
> pain because it didn't come with any other XP disc. The only option for
> reinstalling the (corrupted keyboard driver) Windoze side of the system,
> was to reformat the whole drive. So be careful with your XP side if you
> are dual booting a laptop.
It's not that bad. Reinstalling Windows and reinstalling applications
and tweaking settings takes several hours no matter what. You just
have to add two additional steps:
1. Before reformatting, backup the entire contents of your Linux
partitions across the network or onto a USB drive. Use a rescue CD
such as KNOPPIX for this. Also save a printed copy of your
partition layout if you don't have it memorized. (-:
2. After reformatting and reinstalling Windows, repartition to match
your old layout, then copy the saved contents of your Linux
partitions onto the disk.
USB drives run at 20 MB/sec or better, and 100Mbit ethernet is 10
MB/sec. So if you have 40 GB of Linux stuff, it'll take a little over
an hour to backup over the network, or 40 minutes to a USB drive. So
doing a full backup and restore of Linux is an extra three hours at
most.
As for whether to copy partition images or just copy the files, there
are several considerations.
- full partition copy has higher data rate -- backing up file by file
requires lots of seeks on the source drive, and restoring
file by file requires lots of seeks on the destination drive.
If a partition is nearly full, full partition copy will be faster.
- file by file transfers less data -- unused areas on the disk
are not backed up, so on a nearly empty partition, file by file
will be faster.
- file by file uses less space -- unused areas on the disk
are not backed up.
- file by file is more flexible -- if you don't like the way
your Linux system is partitioned, it's easy to change while
restoring. Full partition copying requires you to restore
into the same partitions with the same sizes as you had.
If you're short of disk space for the backup, you can compress either
a full disk image or a tarfile.
I didn't address the problem of restoring your MBR at all -- that's an
orthogonal problem. (-: Actually, once you've got the partitions
restored, it's pretty easy to boot the rescue CD, chroot into your
hard disk Linux root, and run lilo or grub. But the details vary
wildly.
> Dual booting a few other systems with XP/RedHat or XP/Knoppix(Vanilla
> Debian, Mepis, etc) has been utterly straightforward. All the Linux
> distros seem to set up the dual boot automagically now. The info on the
> Net about manually configuring Grub/Lilo for a simple dual boot is now
> happily outdated.
Not for us hair-shirted Gentoo users it isn't. Fortunately, dual-
booting Windows is not something we'd do. (-:
--
Bob Miller K<bob>
kbobsoft software consulting
http://kbobsoft.com [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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