Hi Alan,
Alan wrote:
Hi Rik,
Excuse my total ignorance but does that mean if i install say Ubuntu and
Suse each one will partition the HDD for its own installation.
Either will reliably trim your XP partition, and allow you to
restructure the drive space for all subsequent installs, to the best of
my knowledge. That said, I have neither used Suse in recent years nor
for this purpose. Ubuntu I have successfully settled alongside Win2K,
truncating its NTFS, and not heard that it won't do the same with XP.
When starting out I bought a copy of http://www.acronis.com Partition
Manager for XP, to avoid any risk at all (cUS$50; superceded product).
Many of the liveCDs will run you through the process, with the option of
not/committing. Ubuntu 6.06's looks very good. Knoppix has GParted,
which Don Gould (& others?) has reported success with alongside XP.
But no, you only do the partitioning once, and select the installer's
'edit partition table manually' option thereafter to specify a selection
for each: hda3, hda4 etc. Each install will format its own partition
only, and the (shared) swap partition (say, hda2). Choose extfs3 format
always, to be safe.
I assume that as it is doing this it also leaves the original "C"
partition in tact minus a chunk off the back end of course.
Yes. Defragmenting C: in Windows is a good idea first.
Cheers
--
Rik Tindall, InfoHelp Services <http://www.infohelp.co.nz> on virus-free
Ubuntu GNU/Linux 6.06 freeOS, 2.6.15-26-686 kernel, GNOME 2.14.3 desktop
OpenOffice.org 2.0.2 suite, Mozilla.org Firefox 1.5.0.5 web browser and
Thunderbird 1.5.0.5 email, gEdit 2.14.4 web editor, gFTP 2.0.18 fileXfer
