>> I seem to recall way back when (Red Hat 4?) having to defrag Windows >> prior to shrinking the partition to ensure that problems of this sort >> were avoided, at least that was the advice the HOWTO mag I bought >> offered so that's what I did. >> > Yes, I did defrag Windows first, several times even, but that bit of data > wouldn't bulge. That's why the paranoid in me thought it might be a > deliberate ploy from Microsoft lol > I understand that kind of data is usually the pagefile. In case anyone's wondering, the tip from Terry (second one) has allowed me to resized the partition without a problem with Windows. Now the problem is GRUB is failing to install. I realise I'm asking an arch-centric question in bugging you all with this, but here's the c'n'p of what I posted on the Arch forums in case anyone thinks they can lend a hand.
Using the pre-release core (i686) iso 2011.03.23 because the standard iso doesn't have the drivers to support my wireless device (though neither seems to have a driver for the wired interface, interestingly) When at the 'Install Bootloader' step, it attempts to build the GRUB device map, then the arch installer quits, printing this at the bottom along with a console prompt: ERROR: device_is_raid needs a blockdevice as $1 ( given) Attempted to then run 'grub-install' from said console as follows: [root@archiso ~]# grub-install /dev/sda --root-directory=/mnt Probing devices to guess BIOS drives. This may take a long time. The file /mnt/boot/grub/stage1 not read correctly/ [root@archiso ~]# I found I had to pass the root-directory argument, as otherwise it couldn't find the stage1 file. This hard disk is not using raid in any way, and for reference has a partition layout as follows /dev/sda1 ntfs as PQSERVICE /dev/sda2 ntfs as SYSTEM RESERVED /dev/sda3 ntfs as Acer /dev/sda4 extended partition containing: /dev/sda5 ext3 as / /dev/sda6 swap The first three were already present on the disk with Windows 7, which incidentally continues to boot without issue. The only modification made was to shrink the Acer (aka C:\) partiton with GParted to make room for Arch. Would rather use GRUB than other bootloaders unless unavoidable. Thanks for any help offered. -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday 2011-04-05 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://goo.gl/4Xue
