ubikuberalles' Blog - The Easy Way

RSS Bot · September 23, 2007

Sometimes the easy way is, in actual fact, the painful way. As in the case with my efforts to install Linux on one of my computers.

Last week my dad gave me his old laptop. It had a 37 GB drive and only about 8 GB was being used by WinXP. My original plan was to Ghost the laptop disk to a second drive, split the laptop disk to two partitions, Ghost the WinXP data back to the laptop disk and then install Linux on the second partition. Pretty simple plan, although I was a little hesitant in removing the drive from the laptop (slight fear of Fubaring the disk and/or the laptop, I guess).

The next day I had some questions about the install and I mentioned my plan to my Linux teacher. He told me that it would be quicker and better if I just resized the partition using a partition program like PartitionMagic or mparted (turns out he really meant qtparted). Ok, I thought, I'd give that plan a shot. That should save me quite a bit of effort. Boy, was I wrong.

First I had to figure out where to get this qtparted program. My teacher told me that I would need to download an ISO image of Knoppix, save it to CD and then boot from that CD. The computer would then be running the Knoppix version of Linux and the qtparted program would be run from there. I quickly took some notes of what to do and prepared to perform the work on Friday afternoon.

The first step was downloading the Knoppix ISO image. The File size was 696 Mb and with my Comcast connection it should only take a couple hours, max. It took nearly 11 hours. When I saw how long it would take I aborted the transfer and tried a different mirror. Similar results. Now I knew the problem was not with my Comcast connection because I've downloaded other files just before this and they moved much quicker. However, instead of shopping around for a faster mirror, I just let the transfer continue. Besides, I had other things to do in the meantime.

One of those other things included downloading and installing ISO Recorder, a program that saves ISO images to CD (Win XP does not have that ability by default). That didn't take long. The program was small and installation was a breeze. Running it was easy too: just right-click the .iso file and select the "Copy image to CD" option.

The other thing I need to do was defragment my WinXP disk. The reason for that was to make sure all used sectors of the disk were in the first half of the disk. Otherwise, when I resize the partition, I'll lose some files. This didn't work out as planned. After the first pass of the defragmentation there were still a few sectors in the second half of the disk. So I ran it a few more times. The situation improved, but not by much. I compressed the disk and even deleted some files. No luck. Next I rebooted into safe mode and defragmented again. This time I saw some progress but there were still a few sectors south of the halfway mark. Damn. It looked like I'd have to go back to my original plan.

On Saturday morning the download of Knoppix was complete and I was able to quickly burn a CD with the ISO image. Booting up Knoppix was a breeze and it was pretty cool being able to boot up a full working version of Linux on just a CD. It wasn't long before I got the qtparted program running properly and I was ready to resize the windows partition.

At this point I figured that I could get by with setting the WinXP partition to 20GB and that would cover those errant few sectors. I resized the partition and rebooted into WinXP. Windows came up without a hiccup but a pop-up window appeared telling me that Windows installed a new driver file. Oops. I must have clobbered a couple sectors that held a driver file. Sure enough, when I looked at the fragmentation map, there were some sectors at the end of the now resized partition. Oh well, I may have a corrupted system disk but it's working OK so far. I even watched a DVD movie without any issues.

Afterwards I installed SUSE Linux without any issues. The only thing I haven't figured out is how to use my network printer.

Let's review the extra work I had to do with this "better" method:

- Super long download of the Knoppix image

- Download and install of ISO Recorder

- Fragmentation issues with the Windows disk

- Possible damage to the Windows system disk

The good news about this method is that I now have Knoppix on CD (like I said, having a bootable Linux on CD is pretty cool) and I have an ISO Recorder installed.

Despite this misadventure I haven't been discouraged. Last night I downloaded Ubuntu Linux (took only 90 minutes) and I plan to install it on another computer. No partition resizing misadventures this time: it'll be a clean install on an empty disk (I also plan to install WinXP and BSD Unix on the same system).

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