linux saved my butt, but ....

[Bryan.ONeal at asu.edu]

Fedora also "fixed" the partition mapping on the drive, so if you feel like
wiping and reinstalling, just create a separate /home at that time.  But again,
QTParted is the best thing I have found (With out spending a decent amount of
green) to resize partitions, but you really need to have free, unallocated space
on the drive, and you NTFS should be well and truly defraged first; then again,
if your ext3 has less then 5% reserve in the FS it has a tendency not to work
well either, not mater how much free space there is in the partition.

But I focus mostly on the $$, (After all I am an accountant)


BTW if you ever have problems getting an OS onto a drive after something like
this, (or after windows has hosed the drive and you don't want to reinstall MS
just to get track 3 back) try using the boot an nuke utility on the system
rescue disk.  Works great :)

Quoting "der.hans" <PLUGd at LuftHans.com>:

> 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
> -- 
> #  https://www.LuftHans.com/    http://www.AZOTO.org/
> #  Freedom isn't everything, but without freedom you have nothing. -
> der.hans
> ---------------------------------------------------
> PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
> To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change  you mail settings:
> http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
>