[NTLUG:Discuss] hp dv9620us

[Chris Cox]

Dennis Kaptain wrote:
> I just bought a  hp dv9620us laptop. As of this moment it is still sealed in the box unopened.
> 
> I'd like to re-partition the drive and contain vista to maybe 20GB and use the remaining 220GB for Fedora 8.

Ok... 20G for Vista is NOTHING.  You might as well get rid of it.

While I certainly can't praise Linux enough, IT'S the one that doesn't
require much disk space.

Of course, it it was me... I'd just nuke all of Vista.  But if you HAVE to dual
boot, then you need to give Vista lots of space.  Just my opinion.  Otherwise,
IMHO, you really don't need/want Vista.

> 
> Does anyone have any advise on how to: 

Step 0, backup the whole drive.  Easiest way is to boot a rescue Linux
of some kind and then copy /dev/sda (or whatever the drive is called)
to an image file on some other computer or USB media or such.  That way,
if you mess everything up, you can restore the drive easily.

cp /dev/sda /tmpmnt/original-sda.img
(assumes you've somehow mounted space at /tmpmnt)

You can do it across the net too... just have to make sure
to activate the network from your rescue image after boot.
Then something like:

cat /dev/sda | ssh some-other-machine "cd /data-area;cat >original-sda.img"



>    1) best repartition the drive (I'm thinking gparted using a live disk) 
> and or 

Make sure that you defragment NTFS under Vista before you do anything (might
do this prior to step zero above).  If it's not properly defragmented,
an NTFS resize operation may fail.

I haven't used gparted to do an NTFS resize.  I'm usually installing
openSUSE which handles this at install time.

>    2) things to look out for during installation and setup?

Step zero above and the defrag thing.

If you have access to a REAL Vista install CD (not the junk from
HP), then I'd personally give the whole thing to Linux and
run Vista using VMware or some other hypervisor VM thing.

Just some things to consider.
Chris