[ltp] pre-installation advice?

[Patrick Reilly]

My T42p just got here a few days ago. I tried parted, and it munged the 
partition - the recovery program put it back OK once I dropped the partition.

I ended up just using QtParted (from Knoppix) to resize my /dev/hda1 down to 
15GB (still a type c W95 FAT32(LBA) partition), made a new /dev/hda2 (FAT32 
38GB), and left in /dev/hda3 (type c, 4GB). Recovery Program asked me if I 
wanted to wipe the partitions, or just install into "C:". I took the latter, 
rebooted, and ended up with a 15GB WinXP partition and 38GB that I could set 
up for linux - which I'm in the middle of doing.

On Saturday 26 June 2004 10:29 am, Szakacsits Szabolcs wrote:
> On Fri, 25 Jun 2004, Tim Prince wrote:
> > If you're using ntfsresize, as supplied by SuSE, there's an advantage in
> > doing it before files start to clutter up the space beyond the directory
> > and system files.  No need to do it before running XP, but ntfsresize, as
> > I understand it, can only shrink it by the empty space at the end of the
> > partition.
>
> Ntfsresize 1.9 and up can relocate any files safely (for a reference, I
> wrote it but please see the man page for details). Suse 9.1 uses one of
> these thus it can shrink NTFS partition without defrag and other tricks
> (without turning off page file, hibernation, etc).
>
> However as most other distros, SUSE also uses Parted (used for the
> partition table manipulation) and 2.6 kernel and they don't always work
> nicely together. There are situations when Parted
>
> 	1) makes Windows unbootable
>
> 	2) shifts the start of partitions (so your filesystem is gone)
>
> Both are recoverable and happen only rarely (not always). This issue is
> filesystem and distro independent. It happened on Mandrake, Fedora,
> Debian, Gentoo, Knoppix, SystemRescueCD, etc, NTFS, FAT32, etc.
>
> Most vendor provided fix for case 1) but not for case 2). Parted fix is on
> the way.
>
> The most reliable way I'm aware currently to resize an NTFS is
> ntfsresize + fdisk. Kernel could be any.
>
> 	Szaka