chebe | The Plan (Reply)

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 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;