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For the laptop, so far; things haven't changed that much, and most of what has is a clear improvement.
- For one, you can resize Windows partitions inside of Windows now. I did run into a problem where it would only shrink it by less-than half the total space. Turned out that that was where the system restore points were saved, and defragmenters couldn't move them. So instead, I turned off system restore and Windows deleted them for me. Resize, then re-enable if you wish. This problem didn't become clear until I used Auslogics Disk Defrag which has a nice block-level visualisation that you can query. (However, you download it through CNet, and my machine started doing funny things, until I uninstalled it. You've heard about CNets antics?)
- Then, as usual, reboot into System Rescue CD, and with
- Boot into your linux install disc, use all the empty space (of the extended partition), and install. It must have been a common bugbear, because now there is a nice little checkbox during the Fedora install asking whether or not you want to use LVM! (It's easy to make me happy.) It asked where to put the bootloader, and I pointed it at the extended partition as well. (So that's;
- Reboot back into System Rescue CD, use
- This for me was the newest bit.
Excellent tutorial/walkthroughs I found very helpful;
- For one, you can resize Windows partitions inside of Windows now. I did run into a problem where it would only shrink it by less-than half the total space. Turned out that that was where the system restore points were saved, and defragmenters couldn't move them. So instead, I turned off system restore and Windows deleted them for me. Resize, then re-enable if you wish. This problem didn't become clear until I used Auslogics Disk Defrag which has a nice block-level visualisation that you can query. (However, you download it through CNet, and my machine started doing funny things, until I uninstalled it. You've heard about CNets antics?)
- Then, as usual, reboot into System Rescue CD, and with
gparted create a new partition, formatted NTFS, and label it 'storage'. However, the laptop came with three primary partitions, and this made four (which is the maximum allowed). So I had to make the rest an extended partition.- Boot into your linux install disc, use all the empty space (of the extended partition), and install. It must have been a common bugbear, because now there is a nice little checkbox during the Fedora install asking whether or not you want to use LVM! (It's easy to make me happy.) It asked where to put the bootloader, and I pointed it at the extended partition as well. (So that's;
/, /home, swap, and /boot in total.)- Reboot back into System Rescue CD, use
gparted again to get the name of the boot partition path (e.g. /dev/sda6), then as usual, copy the first 512-bytes using dd. I must have been using an old System Rescue CD because it was loading the NTFS partitions read-only, but having a FAT32 usb-key around is always handy. I saved the bytes of the boot partition there, then rebooted into Windows.- This for me was the newest bit.
boot.ini has been replaced with bcdedit. Found a couple helpful walkthroughs though, and it's simple enough. Edit the boot file through cmd-line instead of directly in text file. When done, reboot, and choose whichever OS you want :)Excellent tutorial/walkthroughs I found very helpful;
- http://lifehacker.com/5403100/dual+boot-windows-7-and-ubuntu-in-perfect-harmony
- http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/working-around-windows-vistas-shrink-volume-inadequacy-problems/
- https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Windows_and_Arch_Dual_Boot
- http://www.iceflatline.com/2009/09/how-to-dual-boot-windows-7-and-linux-using-bcdedit/
