making room for linux

[Christopher Moore]

Chuck,
I lost track of your HP repartitioning saga.  I too have an HP laptop on 
which I want to run Linux.  HP put the recovery partition at the end of 
the drive which means you can't shrink the data partition and add more 
partitions without first deleting the recovery partition.  This of 
course can be done if you've made a DVD backup of your initial system.

The virtual solution makes a good deal of sense.  Another thing you 
could do is to install a talking arch onto a removable USB drive and 
boot from it.  A third approach would be to remove the recovery 
partition, shrink the data partition, install linux on the balance of 
the drive, and add an entry to the windows boot loader for linux.

Chris

On 11/23/2011 3:12 PM, Kerry Hoath wrote:
>
> It is worth mentioning here that windows 7 does include the tools to
> grow and shrink partitions although it can not move them.
> start ->run dismmgmt.msc
> then right click the partition and select shrink.
>
> At a wild guess you have a recovery partition, a system partition and
> data partition. If you don't already you'll want NVDA installed to read
> the screen or something else.
>
> You can do all grow/shrink things from the command-line in windows if
> you run diskpart
> look on m$ knowledge base for info however stuff like this works:
>
> diskpart
>
> list disk
> select disk 1
> list partition
> select partition 2
> shrink size=300G
>
>
> something to be aware of, Windows 7 will blast your boot loader if you
> reinstall it and it's not as simple as installing the mbr back again as
> it once was as the loader in windows 7 got bigger.
> If you install something other than windows 7 loader to mbr, make sure
> you have a way of putting the old stuff back, I usually back up the
> first track with dd.
> dd if=/dev/sda count=63 of=track0.img
>
> If you put Linux boot loader in mbr then you can configure that to boot
> windows if desired.
> I usually find it best to have at least 1 primary partition for Linux I
> personally make it /boot
>
> regards, Kerry.
>
> On 24/11/2011 2:08 AM, Chuck Hallenbeck wrote:
>> My new laptop came with Windows 7 installed on it, and I want to create
>> space on the HD to install Linux. I was expecting Windows to be in
>> a single partition, but I find it is spread over three partitions,
>> occupying the entire 500 GB disk.
>>
>> Any tips about how to handle this twist would be appreciated. I might
>> never use windows, but others might, if I can preserve it.
>>
>> --
>> Chuck in Hudson.
>> Web address: www.hallenbeck.ftml.net, Messenger JID: chuckh1 at jabber.org
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