Robert Donovan wrote:
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.
My own procedure, which has worked well up thru XP (I have no experience
with Vista) is as follows:
1) Change Windows' swap file to fixed size (usually 1.5 X installed RAM)
2) Disable swap file
3) Reboot into Safe Mode
4) Defrag HDD (which will now remove swap file space)
5) Re-enable swap file (now contiguous and fixed)
6) Reboot
7) Carry on allowing Windows to abuse and otherwise play havoc with
your and your loved ones' lives.
8) MS Profits
--
Best Regards,
~DJA.
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