Re: [opensuse] Inspiron 9400 question about shrinking partition

On Thursday 16 November 2006 19:14, you wrote:
Ok! I do not own partition magic, are there any reliable foss
solutions for the problem?

Since I do not have any windows installations I do not want to do away
with this factory install, I want to tinker with the beast.  I have
been windows free since 1998.
Due respects to rudolf... but NTFS is not supported (well its supported in
read only mode) and the shrinking software on the system I setup for my
daughter clobbered the NTFS partition... end of story.

I had a similar problem with my daughter's HP s7400n slimline system that we
setup for college. She wanted to keep the XP partition (just in case) to
tinker with it, or in case she ran into a situation at the college where
something would only *work* there... anyway, she mostly does Suse 10 and has
never needed the partition, but I will relay the story just the same.

As stated earlier the shrinking software *did not* handle the partition
correctly and it would not bootup again. Fortunately for her, HP provides a
backup partition that can be loaded from bios that will restore the factory
preload in case of catastrophe... and that worked fine. What I did for her
was to format the shrunk partition and then install Suse 10 on the remainer
of the drive. Then I used DD to save the MBR to a file. Then I reinstalled
the factory software from the backup partition, and then restored the Linux
MBR. This all worked fine.

As it turned out... she is now M$ free as well and has finally lost her
paranoia about *maybe* needing windoze... so it was a lot of work for
nothing... she is happily writing papers with OpenOffice, emailing with
Thunderbird, and Surfing with Firefox... and she has *never* had a system
crash yet...

Go for it... wipe out the XP partition... you'll never miss it. Oh, by the
way, did I mention that her factory preloaded software from HP was almost
entirely a marketing gig????? Yeah, most of the system was a teaser... try
this for a while then download the real thing for some more BIG bucks... and
most of it (except the lame windoze games) come preloaded and fully
functional in Suse 10. Go ahead... tinker with it... then blow it away.





--
Kind regards,

M Harris <><
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