[Scottish] Xp Dual boot

[Colin McKinnon]

On Wednesday 17 November 2004 04:54, William Anderson wrote:
> Colin.Speirs at scotland.gsi.gov.uk wrote:
> > [snip]
> >
> > He runs XP2 as his main OS abut has disk space to spare. Is there any
> > problem in repartitioning and reformating some odf that space and Dual
> > booting? Does NTFS object?
>
> I did this with knoppix and XP a while back, as knoppix has ntfs partition
> resizing tools included - possibly one of the scarier moments of my IT
> career.  It's doable, but you'll / he'll be in brown pants mode for the

Last time I tried this (SuSE 9.0 on top of an XP installation) I ran into 
problems - there was lots of free space on the disk, but it was so fragmented 
I couldn't shrink the NTFS partition much. The MS supplied defrag wasn't much 
help.

I eventually sorted it by using a shareware defragger, then the MS defragger, 
then the shareware one in a few iterations and eventually got the used space 
coalesced. When I'd read up on NTFS resizing before it sounded horribly 
complicated and fraught with pitfalls, but once I'd got the defrag thing out 
of the way, it was just a matter of clicking a couple of buttons in the SuSE 
installer (maybe it was horribly complicated and fraught with pitfalls - but 
the UI hid it all away from me). Similar story for the boot loader.

(I'm accumulating quite a stack of spare IDE drives - but this was in a laptop 
to adding a new drive wasn't really an option).

In the good old days of Windows 3.11 and 95 I had a copy of Partition Magic 
(paid for!) which worked very well.

Nowadays it isn't a problem - I just erase the Microsoft partitions ;)

C.