installing Red Hat 8.0

[wax eagle]

Yesterday I spent an entire frustrating day trying to install Linux Red hat 8.0 on my HP pavilion. Unfortunately, due to the way that HP has decided to distribute the Windows XP software packages with their computers. They have made it quite near impossible to dual install Linux and Windows XP without first buying Parition magic...

Anyways does anyone know a way to non-destructively repartition an NTFS formatted Hard drive without using Partition magic? (which I would be quite pressed to obtain here in Ecuador).

Yesterday I managed to get my computer to where it wouldnt even restore off of the recovery partition, (very glad I made that 6 CD backup set). Whatever happened to distributing original XP discs with systems?
-Wax...

[wax eagle]

Sorry for the double post there, system confuzzled me..mods, or whatever you have here, please delete one of these..

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

Who you should point your guns at in this situation is really Microsoft. They made specific design changes to XP to make it nearly impossible for XP to live and play nicely with Red Hat Linux, any distribution.

If the XP partition owns the whole hard drive, there is now way I know to do this job without partition magic.

You could destructively install Red Hat(I'd recommend 9 btw) and allocate it half the hard drive. Then you can use Linux as the partition manager and allocate some NFS space, boot into it and re-install XP. You'll need to first extract the cab files to a cd so you don't have to use the boot cd that comes with the pavillion.

Sorry I don't have the answer you want. Good Luck.

Oh, if its partition magic you need, I'd be happy to buy a copy and ship it to you. You'll need to estimate shipping costs and get me some US. currency to cover shipping and purchase, but there is nothing in US export laws that says I can't do that.

sprotter@investmenttool.com
identify yourself on the subject line, I get a lot of spam.

SEP

[wax eagle]

Thanks Steve, but Ill just go ahead and try my back up plan. Which is to buy a small hard drive and pop it into the computer and run linux off of that. It seems like the best option...

Buying partition magic and getting it shipped here is an idea, but its really ilogical when I can get a hard drive for less than that and as long as it will play nice. As far as US currency, thats never a problem, Ecuador uses the Dollar with teh exception of the Ecuadorian stamped change..(same size and weight as American coins very easy to confuse...)...Anyways thanks for the offer, but Ill have to decline...

[rcmikey]

The latest distributions of Mandrake Linux (8.1 I believe) can resize NTFS partitions during installation. If you really prefer not to have Mandrake Linux installed, you could use the Mandrake installer to repartition the drive, then remove the Mandrake installation and install RedHat in it's place.

On my personal notebook, I successfully decreased the size of the Windows XP NTFS partition using the "static linked" ntfsresize binaries discussed here:

http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/man/ntfsresize.html

The process is a little ungainly, but it worked flawlessly. The steps I followed were:

1) Boot into Windows XP and defragment the NTFS partition.

2) Boot to Rescue Mode on RedHat Linux 9.

3) Mount a floppy with ntfsresize static linked binary, and follow the directions to resize the NTFS partition.

4) Run fdisk -- delete, then immediately recreate the NTFS partition to the size specified with ntfsresize.

It is >imperative< that you read the entire page linked above, as well as the two links contained in that page. Apparently, all of the problems reported with the ntfsresize tool are due to not following the directions carefully.

Also, since the final step in the process using ntfsresize is to delete, then recreate the NTFS partition -- be sure you have everything important backed up from Windows XP.

The only issue I had was a moment of panic when the notebook couldn't find an operating system after resizing the partition. In my case, it was because I had forgotten to flag the NTFS partition as bootable using the Linux fdisk utility. Other than that, it worked very well and was done entirely with freely downloadable, open source tools.

Good luck!

[Simon Galton]

I understand that SuSE also allows NTFS resizing at install time.

One solution may be to get a Mandrake or SuSE installation disk set and begin the installation process with these distributions and after resizing reboot and switch to RedHat.

That having been said, your idea of a separate disk is also going to solve your problem. If there is any space left on your original disk you will want to consider putting your primary swap on it -- this will divide your system I/O between the two spindles.

For lots of excellent information on the standalone NTFS resizing tool, see: http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html

Simon

[cuitlahuac gomez laboug]

Hello,

well I choosed the 'easy' way after many problems trying of win against recovery system of Presario and the drivers...
I get the decision of install another hard disk, I am using SuSE 8.2 personal ( swap and / in hdb ) and windows XP (in hda) without any problem, by the way Presario 4420 comes with a conexant modem suported as linmodem HSF then all the Desktop hardware works 100% :)

PS SuSE do not resize NTFS, when SuSE offers that service comes with partition magic ;).