On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 7:47 AM, Carl Lowenstein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Thu, Jun 5, 2008 at 11:48 PM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> I'm gonna take a risk and try to turn my kid's and wife's Windows 2000 laptop >> into a dual boot Ubuntu/W2K laptop. >> >> Is there open source software to shrink the Win2K partition that is 100% >> safe? > > Nothing is 100% safe. On the other hand, Gparted and Pmagic are two > different GUI implementations of the same open-source partitioning > tools. (GNU Partition Editor) I have found both of them to be > reliable. Yet another version of this software is built into the > installer for Ubuntu; > > By the way, when you say "Win2K partition" do you mean FAT32 or NTFS > file system? > > Before working on the repartitioning, you should of course use the > Windows tools to defragment the file system.
I would only add that the Windows defrag doesn't leave the file contiguous and sometimes leaves immovable system files in the middle of other, non-system data or at the last part of the disk. This usually isn't a problem on today's huge hard drives, but I zapped a windows 2K install after shrinking a partition because the immovable files were orphanned beyond the shrunken partition boundary. I backed up everything first, but I needed to do a clean DBAN, repartition, and reinstall to get the damn thing to work right again. I think Gparted warns you about this, or simply won't let you do it, but it's been a while. This also may be an artifiact of older versions of PartitionMagic, which is what I was using at the time. -- KPLUG-List@kernel-panic.org http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
