linux saved my butt, but ....

[der.hans]

Am 25. Aug, 2005 schwätzte Josh Coffman so:

>   My kids started fighting over playing Tux games on
> my laptop. So i figured I would dual boot the
> desktop...
>
>   I backed-up, defragged, and booted a livecd (Mepis)
> to shrink the partition.
>
>   Well Mepis messed up. I like Mepis and was planning
> on using it for the desktop. But now I couldn't do
> anything. Actually, it was QTParted that caused the
> problem.
>
>   fixmbr didn't work, couldn't install windows, Mepis
> couldn't install. I tried a couple others that
> couldn't fix it. Anyway, Fedora Core 4 installed
> great. I just told it to use the whole disk an remove
> any previous partitions.
>
> Thing is I was planning on partitioning the drive so I
> could at least have seperate /home and /swap. That way
> I could easily switch distros without deleting
> everyone's files.
>
> Now I'm a little gun-shy about trying to shring a
> partition again, but I'd like to be able to switch
> distros if I feel like it. Suggestions?

Well, the way to do it is the tool that already burned you...

parted is the tool to use to resize the partitions. Maybe you missed a
step or it just didn't handle the m$ filesystem properly.

Dennis highly recommends system rescue cd for parted, but I would think
anything that has a current version would be fine.

I recently looked at the parted documentation and they mentioned problems
with ntfs that had only recently been overcome. I've only used parted a
couple of times, though, so take advice from others about it as being more
relevant.

You should already have a swap partition. Look at /etc/fstab and output
from 'free'.

$ grep swap /etc/fstab
/dev/hda6       none            swap    sw              0       0
/dev/hdb2       none            swap    sw              0       0
$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        515824     506436       9388          0       9376     161008
-/+ buffers/cache:     336052     179772
Swap:      1474708     737628     737080

ciao,

der.hans
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