> o The University does not have Partition Magic. Ok, let's all have a loud lough together.
Seriously, tell them that considering the mega-cash they waste^H^H^H^H^Hspend on billyware each year, you'd think the dept as a whole would be able to shell out for one (as in *1*) copy of partition magic. Run it on each box in turn. <sarky> Considering we're talking the IT(!) Dept here, it would appear to be obvious that they can back up a windows install onto somewhere, use fdisk, and ghost it back, otherwise one might think they're overpaid even at the rates uni is reportedly paying. </sarky> If a second disk is out, resizing the MS partition before mentioning Linux may be a good idea. Alternatively, explain to them that because these machines use proprietary technology protected by patents bla bla bla Linux is unfortunately unable to perform this job for free and that you need them to buy a great linux program for the resizing job. The price happens to be the same as that of partition magic, and, surprise, it's also called partition magic. > o Gnu Parted (and possibly "fdisk") could be used to > resize a partition, but you would no know if you are > about to wipe some data, which has been placed at the > end of the partition for a very good reason. I tried once to use the SuSE (8.0) install to downsize a partition to keep the existing M$ install just in case. It refuses to downsize below the highest used disk block. I then booted billy and ran scandisk, but it would refuse to move locked disk blocks downwards. As there were some right towards the end of the disk (probably some copy protection scheme of some silly games which were on there before) the downsizing turned into a non-event, and when I was p***ed off enough I just wiped the whole thing. By the looks of it, SuSE has integrated gnu parted into the installer. Chances that it won't operate on an ntfs partition are high, given the fact that billy does his best to hide and obscure the ntfs specs. Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is possibly list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.orcon.net.nz/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
