Midnight in the Partition of Good and Evil

[Doomgaze]

Is there any way to shrink an existing NTFS partition?

[crono_logical]

Delete and create a new one :p

I do not recommend Partition Magic for resizing NTFS volumes - both times I have tried, it has trashed up the HD it was working on, and only once I was able to recover the previous partition table and get the data back, the other time ended up with a good as empty disk.

[Doomgaze]

Damn. I really don't want to burn 10 GB of backups to CD...

[Dr Unne]

I've resized an NTFS partition with Partition Magic, it worked fine. I'm hesitant about doing it though, and I wouldn't have even tried if I'd had anything important on my windows partition. Defragging your HD first should help make sure it works, in theory, though NTFS filesystems are a bit more complicated than others and I'm not quite sure how much fragmentation would matter. So much stuff can go wrong though. It took hours, and if the power had gone off in the middle or something, I would've been screwed.

No need to back up all 10GB, unless you actually have 10GB of stuff you need. Windows itself doesn't need to be backed up, or any of your programs, etc. Just all your data, documents, game savegames, etc. The vast vast majority of stuff on your computer can easily be reinstalled if you lose it, I've found. Unless you have 10GB of MP3s of songs you don't own and programs you stole from the internet, or something.

So yeah, if Windows would publish the specifications for NTFS, there'd be a hundred tools for resizing them, but it's not in MS's interests to let you know anything about your own computer they don't want you to know. Yay for Windows.

[Doomgaze]

Hm, come to think of it, a great deal of that is ripped cds. Since I'm not at college anymore, I don't need THOSE. If the size of my stuff other than that isn't too bad, I'll try that.... IF I can find my XP serial, in case partition magic kills it.


Riddle me this, Batman - I'm often found on Carmen Sandiego's head, and I'm going on the freed up space. What am I? ;)

[eestlinc]

:D

[Citizen Bleys]

At least you picked a good distro :)

[Doomgaze]

They stuck it in with one of my textbooks. Since downloading isos on 56k isn't my thing, I take what I can get ;)

[Citizen Bleys]

So it's probably a crap old version then. Oh well.

[Doomgaze]

Actually, it's a 2003 edition, so...

*checks*

Publisher's Edition Red Hat Linux 8.0, 2 discs.

[Dr Unne]

Latest version is 9.0, but I don't think there's too much difference between 8 and 9.

[Citizen Bleys]

8 beats 9, hands down. Red Hat 9 was a *major* disappointment.

As a matter of fact, 8.0 happens to be, in my opinion, the best version.

Nice deal.

[Dr Unne]

What was wrong with 9? I think 8 was worse than 7, personally. The gui was worse, anyways. Wasn't 8 when they first introduced Bluecurve and started to distribute a sucky corrupted version of KDE? The auto-downloading update thing was handy though. *cough*almost as useful as gentoo's portage*cough* 8 is the last version I tried.

[Citizen Bleys]

Bluecurve was good, but nothing worked right in RH9, therefore it sucked.

Same reason I hate Debian: It doesn't work.

[crono_logical]

Debian works nicely for me. Then again, I've never used a GUI on a Debian machine :p

[Doomgaze]

Is there anything like partition magic that's, um, free?

[Burtsplurt]

I think Mandrake Linux has the option to change NTFS partition sizes (at least it says it does on the website but I was wary, so I used Partition Magic), but that means that you'd have to download Mandrake, install it, delete it, and then install RedHat. So, yeah, ignore that.

[Doomgaze]

No, Mandrake's resizer will delete the data on the partition, as far as I know. 8.1 does, at least.

[Peegee]

go the long way and use fdisk. You're going to be erasing your partitions anyway.

[Doomgaze]

meh, I don't feel like doing that now :p


downloading drivers and programs and all, yeah. that sucks.

What if I bought a small, cheap HD? Would it be possible to boot an OS off a secondary HD?

[crono_logical]

Yes, just install to that disk instead :p

[Citizen Bleys]

I've never had any other kind of setup.

You'd want at least 2 GB for RedHat 8, though. Preferably 5. Especially since you'll be able to read (with some work) but not write your NTFS partitions. So, basically, you can't download something in Linux and have it still be available when you go into 'doze, unless you create a fat32 partition for inter-OS sharing.

[Dr Unne]

I doubt you'll find an HD for sale less than 40GB nowadays. Two hard drives is the easiest way to dual-boot, yeah. Windows on the master drive, Linux on the slave drive, and put lilo or gub on the master boot record of your master drive to handle the booting.

[Doomgaze]

Installing a new HD isn't much of a hassle, is it? I mean, I really haven't installed anything more complex than a modem.

[Dr Unne]

No, you set the jumpers to indicate master or slave, plug in the IDE cable, plug in the power cord, screw it down and you're done.

[Citizen Bleys]

Setting the jumpers is easy, too...it's just a little plastic cap that connects two pins...It'll probably be shipped in the "master" configuration, but there will be a diagram somewhere on the hard drive itself that shows jumper settings, and it should confirm that the hard drive is detected on the POST, so you don't even have to load up an OS to check it.

Both your IDE channels are probably filled (One with a hard drive, and the other with a CD-RW in most cases), so you just trace the cable that your hard drive is hooked up to until you find another connector and plug that into the new hard drive, and then fasten the hard drive into one of the bays on your case (two screws will do it. The manufacturer will reccomend four, but as long as it's held in place, there's no need to take apart your whole case just to get at the other side of the hard drive bay. Most cases have something in the way). Most modern IDE cable is keyed so that you can't even install it backwards. (If it's not, remember red line to pin one)

Since you're installing RedHat, you don't even need to frig with partitions with fdisk; Just boot from the Red Hat CD, partition with Disk Druid. Start by making a swap partition of 1.5x your system memory (so if you have 512MB of RAM, create a 768MB swap partition), and then you can divvy up the rest of the space any way you want. For a beginner, you'll probably want to toss it all on one big partition, but I like to keep my /home, /var/www/html, and /usr/bin partitions separate, with a small (100 MB) /boot partition.

/home is where you would store all of your personal data files (i.e. mp3s)

/usr/bin/ is where most software is stored

/var/www/html/ is where stuff on your webserver would be. If you want to run a webserver. I usually do so that I can experiment with new versions of vBulletin as they come out ;)

/var/www/html should be very, very small, since you're probably not going to be hosting any other web sites. On my setup, /usr/bin is always the biggest partition.

[Dr Unne]

If you have 512 MB RAM, you probably don't need that much swap. I've probably only touched 12 MB of swap total as long as my computer has existed.

I keep my DocumentRoot(s) in /home/*/public_html/. Matter of preference. I'd rather not give unprivelidged users write permissions on any folder other than their home dir. So I'd go with a /boot, a /, and maybe a /home if even that. But it's all a matter of preference.