[NTLUG:Discuss] hp dv9620us

[Robert Citek]

I pretty much did what Chris suggested with my wifes new Toshiba
laptop that came with Windows Vista:

1) booted Knoppix and created an image backup to a 500 GB external USB drive.
2) installed Ubuntu Feisty, resizing Vista's NTFS partition from
within the installation.

Works great.  Writing this e-mail from Ubuntu on the laptop.

Regards,
- Robert

On Dec 19, 2007 10:52 PM, Chris Cox <cjcox at acm.org> wrote:
> 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
>
>
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