[Gloucs] Gloucester, Presario, SuSE

[Dave Elliott]

John,
  I have just seen your message and the replies so far. It sounds like th=
e
Win XP restore disc is not going to be over helpful - so nothing new from=
 MS
there!

I wondered if the following convoluted tale will give you any clues.  I h=
ad
a machine with Partition Magic, Win2k and SuSE 8.1, the OS's being on
different discs for convenience. (I realise that whether I actually need =
PM
is a separate discussion!)

I loaded SuSE 8.2 (from the cd distribution) onto a spare partition  on t=
he
'Linux' disc - (I may have made a mistake with not preparing PM and/or Su=
SE
installer correctly so the situation MIGHT have been avoidable) - and Win=
2k
promptly became inaccessible as SuSE stopped PM .

I 'fiddled' around with the PM cd (which boots to a version of DOS to giv=
e
access to some DOS versions of the PM tools) and finally found a 'restore=
'
style utility which I presume restores the MBR record to PM's liking. (So=
rry
I forget the name but it must have been fairly self-explicit.)

[ Note that you might have to 'manually' find your way around the DOS-sty=
le
'discs' - in addition to boot drive it creates a couple of RAM drives, on=
e
with utilities on it - with letters at towards the end of the alphabet
(check a,c, x,y and z, I forget which were useful). On my machine it tend=
s
to crash on entry due to a known bug (with larger discs?) which makes
finding the utility you want a bit more frustrating but not impossible. (=
It
might be a little easier if you create the floppy discs from the PM cd -
unfortunately my machine only supports a USB floppy & I am too mean/broke=
 to
buy a USB floppy for odd moments like this!) ]

>From then on I could get to both Windows and Linux which should be all yo=
u
need to do.

[In my case with two Linux versions, I had to disentangle the way grub wa=
s
using the 8.1 partition to boot the 8.2 partition with a little selective
copying etc. Then enable the selection of 8.1 or 8.2 from PM instead of
grub. (I wanted to be able to delete the 8.1 image sometime in the future
without loosing the ability to boot 8.2!)]

In summary, this suggests:
 Load XP
 Load PM, shrink NTFS partition, make any useful PM discs you can find, s=
et
PM to install SuSE
 Install SuSE
 Be prepared to 'resurrect' PM if necessary from the cd or floppy restore
discs.

But of course my only relevant experience is that described above - beyon=
d
that I can only wish you luck and a lot of patience. (The other replies
relating to 8.2, the advantages of Linux etc cover that side of the
discussion.)

Regards
Dave

----- Original Message -----=20
From: "John McKeown" <jmckeown@glos.ac.uk>
To: <gloucs@mailman.lug.org.uk>
Sent: Tuesday, July 22, 2003 6:12 AM
Subject: [Gloucs] Gloucester, Presario, SuSE


> WiII will be in Leicester for a few days so won't be around sorry.
> We need date/venue for Gloucester for September, November
> someone at the June meeting volunteered to investigate?
>
> I was in Cheltenham yesterday and had a last-minute idea to make
> a poster and walk around getting some places to put them up - one
> in Equals - two in web-cafes - one in computer shop - one in library.
>
> Traumatic Tale
> Last week a friend visited from California. He'd heard of Linux and
> we installed it on his new Dell Presario 2500. Mandrake 9.1 didn't
> get started even with "nofirewire". SuSE 8.2 ntfsresize (via Rescue
> boot) no joy. PCWorld told me PartitionMagic =A329.99 but turned
> out to be 49.99 - then saw SuSE 8.1 bundling PartitionMagic and
> 8.1OD bundling Acronis. I got both and went home to search info.
> Found that only Acronis knew ReiserFS, so I opened that. But it
> messed up NTFS partition, and XP wouldn't boot, aaargh.
>
> Knoppix went on with nofirewire nousb nopcmcia, but tiny screen.
> Lindows like Mandrake couldn't cope with the firewire. SuSE was
> the only distro that went on smoothly, and downloading some
> Radeon IGP drivers all well. My friend needs to restore XP at
> home and then use PartitionMagic and re-install SuSE.
>
> But he has 8.1 'Office Desktop' which I now realise lacks Apache,
> MySQL etc. SuSE updates already installed packages via FTP,
> but how does it install new packages that aren't on CDs?
>
> regards,
> John
>
>
>
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