Shocky wrote:
I meant to send this as a follow-up to my recent thread about partimage, just
as an FYI, but I forgot until I was reminded today...
The whole partimage adventure started because I wanted to resize a Windoze
partition to make room for Mandriva.
Yes, I know, Mandriva's installer will resize it for you. But for whatever
reason, it is incredibly wasteful when doing so. In the past, I've had it
refuse to cut a FAT partition below 3.5G, when only 1.5G was used (and it had
been defrag'ed), wasting 2G. That was with 2006. With 2007 it was even worse:
with only 1.5G used, it wouldn't cut it below 7G, leaving only 3G for Linux.
Not acceptable.
I read that gparted is supposed to do this too. But all it would do for me is
segfault on a FAT resize operation.
Turns out there's an easier way: good old tar. You can tar up your whole
Windoze partition, park the tarball somewhere, and when you're done
repartitioning and reformatting your drive, just untar the files back into
the FAT partition, and you can boot back into Windoze. Booting into knoppix
or some other live cd makes all of this easy to do. Just make sure the FAT
partition is the first primary partition (well, there are ways around this,
but why bother?), and that it's marked bootable.
On the machine I was working on this time, there was no cd or dvd burner, and
I didn't have an extra hard drive around, so I just used scp to store it on
another machine on my LAN and to bring it back when I was done.
Of course it would be better if I didn't have to dirty my hands with Windoze
at all. But my wife's bank (Scotiabank) recently cut off online access to all
non-Windoze users (even Windoze under VMWare and the Wine version of IE won't
fool them), and I haven't yet convinced her to dump them. To add insult to
injury, they deny doing it and tried to blame the problem on me. Grrrr.
There's an obscure app I need occasionally that's only available for Windoze
too (don't ask), with no Linux equivalent, and won't run under Wine (didn't
try it under VMWare yet). So I'm stuck having to hold my nose and boot
Windoze a few times a month. But I make a point of only working on it with
used computers that already have a licensed Windoze install on them, so that
I don't put any money directly into M$'s greedy clutches.
Just some hopefully useful advice for anyone in a similar situation.
Shocky
one caveat, scp has a file size limit of 2 gigs, as far as I know. so a
tar file larger than 2 gig will fail at 2 gig.
--
reg. Linux User 167806
webhome http://ed-tharp.is-a-geek.org
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