Hi David, >What on earth gave rise to a SPAM-HIGH: warning ? Who can tell, it's a PC thing! :-)
>It is surely just common sense that if you want a multiple boot >machine you should mark the space out before installations. I >have no idea what Linux has to offer in the way of such tools, Now, while I agree that it is sensible to do what you say, I have to state, for the defence, that many people buy a computer and have paid the Windows tax and some version of Windows is installed. They usually have no choice about how the disc is divided up and in many cases it is simply a single huge C@ drive, or possibly a C: and D: drive - and no spare space. Linux offers a host of tools, fdisk, gparted, and others of a similar sounding name that I forget. The Linux installers have one to hand as well. >Bearing in mind you need a Primary ptn' for each bootup, I'm not 100% sure that this is true. You van define a maximum of 4 primary partitions on a disc and then you are stuffed if you want more. To get around this limit, you define an extended partition and chop that into decent sized chunks of 'pseudo' partitions. Both Windows and Linux will recognise those as 'separate' drives. >I did once install W95, 98 & 2000 in one box, as I recall it >was a doddle, Windows just used free space to make the new >primaries, The windows installer would have seen the partitions as separate drives and you told it to 'take over all of drive X' where X is C, D or E and so on with the first hard drive being C, then D and so on upwards. You were basically doing an install into a 'new' disc at that point. I'm unsure how you managed to get Windows to update the MBR though to give you the option of choosing an OS to boot into. Linux examines your disc setup and if it finds a spare 'disc' (or partition) it will advise installing into that plus it will keep your other OS details safe. Unlike an other OS I could mention! >A Sony VAIO of a friend caused quite a headache, a reinstallation was a >pain due to the Sony Specials and an unhelpful dealership My Sony Vaio reinstalled quite nicely thanks. Simply boot off the supplied CD and it asked me if I wanted a full reinstall or a program only. Choose full, and it goes away and repartitions the drive as it was originally, bungs XP back on and all the apps the laptop came with. Once done, a quick deinstall of the cr4p apps, defrag to free up as much space as possible, run my Linux installer and viola (!) a nice 60 GB chunk of ex-windows real estate to install Linux into. Since then, I've rebuilt it completely without Windows after Windows ate my root partition in a fit of pique, but that's life! >Lastly my wife bought an Advent when I was away, at least it is >not Vista, but as the OS and delivered software is only in a >recovery partition, no discs, one cannot reformat the HDD without >losing the system. My wife's DELL as a similar setup, however, a quick scan of the support site at Dell gave instructions on creating a set of 'original' CDs from the recovery partition. This is for people who chose not to bother paying (!!!) extra £5,00 for the CDs to be sent with the laptop. My desktop Dell came with the CDs - I paid up! I'm wondering if your wife's Advent has a similar setup perhaps? If so, you can burn (and test) the CDs then 'burn' the recovery partition as well - use Norton Ghost perhaps - before reformatting it as usable space. >I have never invoked one of these recovery procedures, I presume >they can only do so by recreating the original environment, >everything else would be lost. That's about the gist of it, yes. They recreate exactly the shipped configuration. You basically start afresh with a 'new' hard disc and virgin installation. In the event of a complete rebuild being required, you do have a backup of your user data somewhere, don't you? Also, I'm pretty certain that in the event of you losing the hard disc completely (including the recovery partition) you are entitled to some support from the vendor in reinstalling your system. Whether this means being able to burn a CD or two from the recovery partition or paying for an install disc from Advent, I don't know, but you should perhaps check the small print? Cheers, Norman. _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
