[ILUG] Problems installing Win XP Pro after FE3

[Patrick Stack]

On Wed, 2005-04-27 at 12:09, Niall O Broin wrote:
> On 27 Apr 2005, at 11:54, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> 
> >> Try and keep the windows partition under 8 GB and the first primary
> >> partition.
> >
> > Why try to keep it under 8GB, as a matter of interest?
> 
> Why, to minimise the amount of disk space wasted to Microsoft software, 
> of course.
Of course that's the reason! I'll only be using WinXP for my accounts,
some graphics stuff (which I haven't figured out how to do in GIMP yet)
and testing.

Seriously though, I installed Parted under the FC3 installation and
deleted the VFAT/NTFS partition (hda2). I then created a new partition
in the resultant free space thinking I could copy hda1 (/boot) into
that. Install.exe on the win cd should then be able to boot up.

At this point things got interesting. I unmounted hda1 with umount, and
double checked that it was unmounted cleanly with e2fsck.
Parted however was having none of it and kept giving me "Error:
Filesystem has an incompatible feature enabled" when I tried cp or
check. I could find nothing about this in the documentation or in the
man files. So I googled and came up with various info including the
following:

"tune2fs -O^dir_index /dev/xxx
tune2fs -O dir_index /dev/xxx
e2fsck -D /dev/xxx"

which I tried to no avail.

Apparently the reason Parted doesn't like what I'm trying to do has to
do with "filesystems with sparse superblocks", whatever that means. I'm
afraid this marks the current limit of my understanding. At this point
I'd had enough and deleted the /hda1 with Parted before shutting down.

When I booted up from the Win XP Pro cd this time it worked, and I've
successfully installed Win XP on the first partition.

I was surprised to see that the XP partitioner recognised the other
remaining partitions reporting them to be "unknown".

Now to fix FC3. I'll first try and do a rescue from the FC3 DVD boot. If
that doesn't work I'll have to reinstall.


> 
> 
> /-----\
>   Niall