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Resize Home Partition


UCDKid
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Hello,

 

When I built my desktop computer, I intended it to be used solely as a Mandriva Machine.. Exciting right? However.. because I am a student, there is some academic software that simply does not exist for Linux. (LabVIEW with PCI Card). So I need to install Windows on my desktop. I have a 300Gb hard drive, of which 280Gb is dedicated to the /home partition. I want to create a small <30Gb partition for my windows partition from the /home one. I am unsure of how to do this exactly. I dont want to damage this installation, as it has taken me months to get it this way, so I dont want to get it messed up. Also, if anyone could correct me if i am wrong on how I will do this process, this is what i know so far...

 

Boot from LiveCD /Mandriva or something

Run harddrake to resize partition

Install windows to new partition

Reinstall Grub

 

Ready to go..? Please correct me if I am wrong. Thanks!

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Hi.

 

I'm not sure if what you want is possible (I hope someone with more knowlege corrects me if I'm wrong)... From my experience, I've always installed windows and then any linux OS, letting grub manage the boot.

 

But, you can always install any Virtual Machine like VirtualBox or VMware and install windows on them, this way you can have windows inside your linux distribution

 

Hope this can help you a little bit

 

Cheers

 

Luis

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Windows will claim the MBR. You won't be able to boot to linux afterwards. You will need to use some kind of rescue CD to manually edit and reinstall grub. You will have to manually add windows entry for it.

 

Also, I think Windows can only be installed on the primary partition, while linux can go to an extended partition. So, you will need to manually edit the partition table. Maybe, you could do this with some partition management software. I don't know if it can be done with gparted.

 

I would strongly suggest a full backup :D

Edited by coverup
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There are users on this forum who know how to do this (I'm not one of them unfortunately) however a bit of self help is confidence building :) This link will help: http://apcmag.com/5459/dualboot_ubuntu_and_windows_xp apart from the distro used in the example the steps are the same.

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This is doable, but not easy due to fact that Windows wants a primary partition to itself (which will now be occupied by your root-filesytem). I don't think Mandriva's drakdisk can do enough. I have good experiences with gparted (I use the SystemRescueCD which includes this and much more). You will be moving lots of data around, so do make that full backup. The SystemrescueCD has software for imaging which may help (though not if you are re-sizing a lot).

 

I recommend you review your current setup and clean both / and /home partitions of any files that are not essential (/tmp, /var/tmp, ~/tmp, do I really need logs 4 month old?). This reduces the amount of data that needs moving.

 

My approach would be:

  1. Create some space by shrinking /home or /.
  2. Create a new partition and copy your / partition to it. This way you free up your primary partition for windows
  3. Re-format the old / as NTFS for your future Windows install
  4. Install Windows
  5. Re-install Grub and make sure /boot/grub/menu.lst points to the right drives as well

+-

Edited by pindakoe
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Just make sure that when you resize home that you ensure it starts at the same place that it does now, else you'll lose everything. You cannot move the beginning sector/block for the home partition, so you'd have to have Windows at the end of the disk after home, and not before it.

 

Resizing with reiserfs is easy. With ext3 you have to disable journaling before you can do it and then re-enable it again afterwards.

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Thanks for all the info. I think I will do this when I have at least a day or two to actually be able to devote some time to it. I am running VMWare right now, so I can at least use the software.. I will worry about the PCI card later. The lab equipment will just have to do for now. But I think I will be able to take a whack at it from what you guys have told me so far. Hopefully windows wont mind being all the way on the right side of the HD instead of the left. Thanks!

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It shouldn't, but then you never really know with Windows :)

 

I think though it does prefer to be at least within a Primary partition, therefore if you already have four primary partitions on your disk, you will have a hard job trying to get Windows on it. The main reason being is that you can only have four primary partitions. After this, no more can be created. Now, if you have three primary partitions, then it would be OK to make one more. Or, if you need to make more than one partition, then you create the fourth partition as extended, and then create logical partitions within this one big extended partition. However, if this scenario fits, and Windows wants to be a primary partition, then you'll have a problem.

 

Incidently, I had a weird problem installing Windows on a machine that had Linux recently. I have two hard disks, one 10GB and the second 20GB. I moved by whole system from the 10GB drive, to the 20GB drive so that I could then put Windows on the first disk and have Linux booting on the second disk. When I installed Windows though, it decided to label itself as G: instead of C:. So now my C: drive in Windows XP is G:. I suppose I could try to change it with Partition Magic, and then go through the whole registry using their nice tool for changing drive letters across the whole system and I might just get it back to how it should be. But then, it's not much of a problem having it with a G: drive.

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