[ltp] X60s: Reinstalling on a 100 GB

[Atul Chitnis]

Answering my own question:

Last night, I gave the google search engine servers a workout, and was 
eventually able to resolve the issue. Let me quickly describe what I did, 
to close the loop here:

- original 60 GB drive in the machine, boot of Knoppix, and dd the 
reinstall/predesktop partition into a file on a USB drive.

- Swapped drives, now 100 GB in machine. Boot off knoppix, create 2 
partitions - one vfat, large enough to leave only the required space free 
at the end of the drive, one type &12, same size as the original 
predesktop partition.

- used dd to write the saved partition fro file into the &12 partition.

- Deleted first dummy partition, and did a quick and dirty FC5 install to 
get grub into the MBR. booted and forced grub into commandline mode.

- At grub commandline, issued following comands:

rootnoverify (hd0,1)
parttype (hd0,1) 0x0b
unhide (hd0,1)
chainloader +1
boot

Voila, reinstall program boots and I caused it to reinstall Windows from 
scratch (wiped out all Linux partitions). Only pain was that during the 
repeated reboots, I had to type the grub commands several times until 
install was complete.

- Used Knoppix to run qtparted and shrink the ntfs partition down to 
minimum needed, with some spare.

- Installed full FC5

- Added grub commands to /etc/grub.conf to allow booting of the 
pre-desktop area.

Done.

For reference, here is the structure of my disk now:

[root@vader] ~# fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 100.0 GB, 100030242816 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 12161 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        1958    15727603+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2            1959        1971      104422+  83  Linux
/dev/sda3            1972       11491    76469400    5  Extended
/dev/sda4           11492       12161     5381775   12  Compaq diagnostics
/dev/sda5            1972        2337     2939863+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6            2338        4162    14659281   83  Linux
/dev/sda7            4163       11491    58870161   83  Linux

Partition list:
sda1 - Windows
sda2 - /boot
sda3 - extended
sda4 - predesktop area
sda5 - swap
sda6 - /
sda7 - /home

Pressing the Thinkvantage key doesnt give me the predesktop boot, but I 
know whay - I should have installed grub in /boot, not in the MBR, and 
marked /boot as the active partition.

I could fix it, but since I can boot the predesktop area from the grub 
menu, I am cool.

Also FYI - I installed the EXT2 IFS for Windows 
(http://www.fs-driver.org/) in Windows XP to allow me get at my Linux data 
in the rare cases that I actually boot into Windows. Excellent stuff.

For accessing NTFS, I installed NTFS support for Linux from 
http://linux-ntfs.org

Atul

-- 
-----------------------------------------
Atul Chitnis     | mail@atulchitnis.net
Bangalore, India | http://atulchitnis.net
-----------------------------------------