On Wed, 2003-08-27 at 13:40, Kaj Haulrich wrote: > As Femme and Carroll suggested, I intend to throw in an > additional harddisk. My daughters PC came with this *OS* > (WinXP) preinstalled, and although there is plenty of room on > the hda I can't get the damned thing (XP) to moderate itself. I > tried this *defragging* exercise twice, but it seems unable to > move a certain chunk of files from the end of the partition > (*C:*) = hda1 to join the other files at the beginning of the > partition. Furthermore, there's yet a partition (*D*) =hda2. > Funny thing is, hda1 is NTFS and hda2 is FAT32 (???). > Under these circumstances I don't dare a repartitioning from > Mandrake.
Exactly, and that is the whole point of their defragger; to keep you from having the flexibility to move stuff totally to the other end of the drive. M$ is aware that Linux distro's have methods available to do this sort of thing and they have counterattacked with their built in defragger, making it braindead and also forcing it to put stuff at both ends of the drive. This of course makes it impossible for you to divvy the drive up, which was their whole plan to begin with. In order to get around this, you should install a third party defragger like Norton Utilities Speed Disk or something similar. Speed Disk does allow you to put everything at one end of the drive. I guess I lost track...did you try Win4Lin? > > Now, one could argue : what's the risk - I could always > reinstall this XP toy ? - The answer is : maybe. You see, the > box came without installation CD's (!). I had to burn 6 CD's to > make something they call a *rescue* option. The crap only allows > me to do this once, so I have no chance of knowing if the CD's > are capable of reinstalling the @£%&@. I've got some more good news. Even if you had the bona fide "installation" CD, you would then have to create some XP boot disks from them. And before you could use the boot disks, you would have to have the drive formatted with a previous version of Winblows...namely 98, in my case. If I remember correctly I think I was able to create a Dos 7.10 partition, formatted it, and then the XP boot disks accepted that. So had you tried Win4Lin? ;) > > So, I'll let Mandrake reside on hdb and take over the boot > process. I suppose it's a nobrainer, even with this XP crap ? > > And to Carroll : I'm in no way a father who will send his > daughter off to college deprived of Linux. So much so, that she > herself - grown up with Linux - insists on a Linux box, calling > this XP [EMAIL PROTECTED] a bad joke. She already knows way more about > computers than the joined staff of boys in her class. > > So my fatherly pride is unhurt, even if she has to live with a > contaminated PC. > > Thanks a lot for good advice, all ! > > Kaj Haulrich. I'd like to hear more on this saga. :) LX -- °°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°° Linux Mandrake 9.1 Kernel 2.4.21-0.13mdk *Catch Star Trek Enterprise, Wednesdays on UPN* °°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°
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