Re: Best way to shrink Windows on new laptop?

On 30 Jan 2007, Paul Johnson wrote:
Anthony Campbell wrote:

I'm getting a new Thinkpad Z61M and shall be installing Debian
(naturally!). When I last did this on a Thinkpad a couple of years ago I
just deleted the Windows partition completely, but I have found, *very*
rarely, that I needed it.

I'd therefore like to keep Windows, at least for the moment, so I'll
need to shrink its partition. Two questions:

a. How small could its partition be? Would 10 GB be enough, or too much?

10GB is probably a good number for Windows except Vista which requires
something like 13GB(!) just to get it out of the box.

b. 3.5: If I understand the Debian Installation manual correctly, I can
do this by simply selecting a different size for the partition during
the installation process.

"If your machine has a FAT or NTFS filesystem, as used by DOS
and Windows, you can wait and use Debian installer's
partitioning program to resize the filesystem."

Won't this destroy all the Windows stuff?

Potentially. Always keep a backup. You might also find
http://www.goodbye-microsoft.com/ to be handy.


Thanks to all who've replied with lots of useful information. Looking
forward to putting it all into effect ...

Anthony

--
Anthony Campbell - ac@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Microsoft-free zone - Using Linux Gnu-Debian
http://www.acampbell.org.uk (blog, book reviews,
on-line books and sceptical articles)


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