Re: Dual boot GNU and Windows 7

[Joel Roth]

On Sat, Mar 26, 2011 at 03:51:15PM -0400, Felix Miata wrote:
> On 2011/03/26 16:52 (GMT) Sebastian Tennant composed:
> 
> >> I remember reading a while back that resizing Windows Vista partitions with
> >> Gparted can make it unbootable (XP should be fine though). Not sure if that
> >> is still the case, or what is the deal for Windows 7.
> 
> >Funny, I just read something similar.  As a result I thought I'd try resizing
> >using Windows' own disk tool and this is what it tells me:
> 
> >  "You cannot shrink a volume beyond the point where any unmovable files are
> >   located."
> 
> >        Total size before shrink: 431938 MB
> >  Size of available shrink space: 201358 MB
> >         Total size after shrink: 230580 MB
> 
> >Can you believe it!
> 
> >The 35 GB of data actually on the disk is somehow distributed over 230 GB of
> >disk space in such a way that none of the remaining 195 GB of empty space can
> >be used for anything else.  How brain-damaged is that!
> 
> Sure. You'd think the built in tool would be smart enough to handle
> them, but that's Windows!

No, that's a design decision. Someone was *asked* to provide
that behavior, i.e. to make it difficult to install another
OS.
 
> Invariably on a newish system the only files responsible for the
> obstacle are the huge paging file and the also huge hibernation
> file. You can shrink, eliminate or move them via system settings
> before starting the Vista resizing tool, and may not even need to go
> to that much trouble if you boot into safe mode (almost like single
> user, with no daemons running) to perform the resize operation. Safe
> mode prevents the multitude of automatic start on boot programs that
> litter the system tray and steal so much RAM. Also not having all
> their DLLs in RAM means they aren't locked open files either.

My previous experience with Vista (well, in my hazy memory) was that
eliminating the paging and hibernation files was not enough
to be able to fully resize.
 
> If not using Windows' built in resizer, you can simply delete those
> two (huge) "unmovable" files by mounting the WINSYS partition after
> booting the Linux system you run GPartEd from prior to actually
> starting GPartEd.

Great if it works (as it seems to have for you).
 
> More for multibooters to consider is that historically, it's
> inevitable that Windows will eventually need re-installing. So, to
> prevent damaging Linux when that time does come, read
> http://fm.no-ip.com/PC/install-doz-after.html before planning
> further. In particular, note that Windows' boot loader can start
> Grub, which means in part that Grub need not be the primary boot
> loader.

That's an excellent reference. And I see you are an
authority in the field :-)

[detailed description of install procedures deleted]

>  Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Yeah, OS/2! I liked it, but that was >15 years ago.

Since then I've rebelled against the standard deskstop WM,
using GNU screen and StumpWM.
 
> Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/
> 
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-- 
Joel Roth