[ILUG] Laptops

[Michael Conry]

On 8/29/05, Kevin Philp <kevin at cybercolloids.net> wrote:
> 
><trimmed>... he is complaining that "WinXP doesn't like you messing
> with hard drive partition tables"... is there any truth in this or can I
> happily repartition his laptop hard drive, drop Linux on and boot from Grub?
> 
> Any bad experiences on dual booting Linux with WinXP on laptops?
I bought a new Dell laptop a year ago.  WinXP installed, of course
(NTFS).  I used qtparted on a Knoppix or Kanotix CD (memory fails me
as to which) to resize the NTFS partition.  This worked pretty
straightforwardly.  The main oddity was that when I tried to shrink
the first NTFS partition, it would only shrink it to a size quite a
lot larger than the data on the disk (presumeably files were not all
neatly packed at the start).  When you reboot Windows after, it will
do a fsck-like check on the partition.  What I found was that after it
did this check, if you re-ran qtparted you could shrink it further.  I
repeated this process about 3 times until I'd packed it into a 10 Gb
partition at the start.

Apart from the fsck-checks WinXP didn't have any obvious problems with
any of this (at least until I made the mistake (through haste) of
typing "mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdc" instead of "mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdc5" :-/ ).

> Doesn't WinXP use ntfs and how well is that supported in Linux?
Not exclusively.  Some vendors offer you the choice of FS (some sort
of FAT, or else NTFS). I think NTFS is more common though, and will
generally be the default.  I believe NTFS is read-supported by Linux
for quite some time.  Write-support is available at least through the
captive-NTFS mechanism (which uses the Windows driver from within
Linux), though maybe there are more recent (linux) native versions.

Michael