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How To Make Dual Booting A (Bigger) Pain
the_phenom writes "Thinking of dual-booting your Windoze XP 17" Toshiba P25 laptop? Think again - this one 'uses a DVD with an already setup version of Windows XP Home and then transfers it to the notebook's hard drive,' preventing the normal setup procedure and thus, dual-booting." This reminds me of the unfriendly practice on some PC builders' parts of including an OS "backup" only on a hard-drive partition.
How is this news? Tosh and other vendors have been selling PCs with only a "recovery CD" that wipes everything for years.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
One of my HP machines had a similar setup where Windows 98 (one of my older machines) was distributed as an image on 2 "HP Recovery CDs".
To install Linux on these boxes, I simply resized the Windows 98 partition down to 2 GB and used the other 16GB of freespace to install Linux.
"I filter at +6, and have yet to miss out on an important comment." (#822545)
How is this any different from the "system recovery" disks that have been shipping with laptops for years. I can't remember when I last bought a laptop that came with just a plain OS install disk.
You can call IBM and they will send you CDs for your ThinkPad. They don't usually come with the laptops from the factory because most people never need them.
Basically it costs less on their part.
Use Partition Magic to shrink the XP partition and create space for a Linux partition. How is this any different than thousands of other computer systems out there that come with a rescue disk to rebuild the system to the factory installed image? Yes, for the 1% of users that want to dual boot it will be a minor pain. For the other 99% of the users a rescue image like that is a godsend and saves support costs for the company. If the computer is completely hosed, stick the DVD in and reformat/reload. No need to pay a computer geek to work his magic on your broken Windows box.
If it's a regular Windows installation on an NTFS disk you can still install Linux by resizing. You can use either Partition Magick or the first disk of the Mandrake 9.1 set to resize the NTFS disk. Make sure to defrag the NTFS partition from within Windows first before doing this procedure or else the contents will be destroyed.
The problem seems to be that the image is the size of the disk so reinstallation of Windows, once Linux is already installed, will overwrite all partitions. It's just a complete disk image on the DVD. One workaround is to do the Windows installation, install Linux, use something like g4u to create a copy of your disk.
Or, use dd from the Linux partition to copy the Windows image once it's all installed.
It isn't that hard. I had to do this with my Dell. Most systems now come with "image restore" disks instead of installation disks for software piracry reasons.
Now, to dual-boot all you have to do is:
1) resize your windows partition using any available tool (I purchased partition magic).
2) Install linux in the newly created free space.
3) Put the bootloader (I'm partial to Grub now) into the MBR.
And you're off to the races!
Of course, this means that if your windows partition goes south you have to backup your linux partition and start from scratch, but that's the risk you take.
It doesn't stop you from installing linux, it doesn't stop you from dual-booting. It is simply a quick and easy way to install windows for a fixed hardware platform.
Jason Pollock
here...r esize.htm l
http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfs
Now we just have to pour some resource into it.
Actually, the HPaq EVO D510's we've got at work came with a recovery CD that you're supposed to start with and a WinXP Pro CD that you put in during the recovery. If you just put in the XP CD, it boots and installs normally. I'm not sure if it actually works, because there is no key on the CD case, but I have been able to get as far as the point where it asks for the key. I suppose the recovery CD handles that part. If you could find out what the key is that they're using (I doubt it's the FCKGW one), you might be able to install XP clean.
;-).
Or, as clean as is possible
Anyway, maybe it's possible to just put in the OS CD, if you get that option with other vendors.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
As others have stated, this is a non-issue.
My Compaq Presario 2715US came with Windows XP on a series of three CD's that will wipe everything before putting them back on. As far as I know, this is fairly common practice nowadays. The twist here is that all of the Microsoft applications (XP and Works) and the drivers are within the image, all of the other apps that came with it (WinDVD, Symantec Anti-Virus, etc.) are included on their own CD's.
It's easy to make a dual-boot. Resize the NTFS partition, and then install Linux into the empty space. GRUB or LILO will then install into the MBR, and presto, dual-boot!
The thing that I hate about XP versus Windows 2000 (and earlier, I believe) is that XP seems to deliberately clobber the MBR. For example, if I install Linux (and GRUB or LILO), then install XP afterwards, GRUB/LILO is gone, I have to use a boot-disk to get back into Linux. This pisses me off to no end.
As for those images... If you get Windows 2000 or Windows XP images, you've almost got a full-bootable copy. The image for my laptop was made with (I think) DriveImage, and I was able to get an evaulation copy of it, and it allowed me to extract the i386 (CABs) directory. From there, I just had to borrow a few files (like setup.exe, etc.) from a friends' XP installation CD (which indicently came with a Dell laptop he bought), and make it bootable according to Bink's pageOf course, not knowing fully about how Windows XP's activation works, I didn't want to just make a copy of his XP install CD, in case it was keyed for a Dell laptop. And, just in case, it somehow cut him off. :)
-- Joe
The Knoppix CD has QTparted. This is a great GUI wrapper for various tools to partition and resise partitions. You can even shrink NTFS partitions. The Knoppix CD boots to Linux without doing anything to the hard drive. It is great. Free download of ISO image is available.
/boot partition.)
You can also use the Knoppix CD to install Debian Unstable to the hard drive. 2 warnings:
1) It will put LiLo on the MBR. ( I prefer to put it on the boot record of the
2) After hard drive intall it will first boot with KDE in German! It is hard to find the right GUIs to get it into English. There are instructions on the internet on how to find these GUIs.
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
Because it works like this...
1. Boot machine for first time with DVD in drive. It boots from DVD.
2. Agree to be Bill Gates' towel boy, click "okay"
3. System them uses Windows equivalent of "dd" to copy image from DVD to hard drive, overwriting anything on the drive.
What you'd end up having to do is install Win first, then resize the partition and install Linux afterwards.
If you have to reinstall Windows, it'll kill your existing Linux partition because it will overwrite the drive with its image.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I have a Toshiba laptop with the same recovery disks (3 CD's instead of the DVD, but the same concept).
It was a bit of a pain at first, as I did have to buy System Commander (which is very cool as a boot-loader and as a utility) to get around this. Since the install image is NTFS you'll need Partition magic 7 or 8 or SC7. Not sure if there is a freeware utility to munge NTFS partitions.
Once up and running, I took a snapshot of the resized XP partition and now I don't need the recovery disks. It is nice though that Toshiba installs all of the drivers for you, and that the system works out of the box after re-imaging.
As for running another O/S on this laptop, Linux and Solaris are VERY well supported, so I don't think I'd give up this laptop just cause of this slight inconvenience. The laptop is a 1415-S173 Celeron 1.8GHz which has a beautiful screen and was $850.00 new with rebate and 512MB. In short, it kicks price/performance ass.
Contrary to popular belief, life is not a bitch. It is far far worse.
I have never tried, but it seems you could install WinXP, resize the drive, install Linux, and then use "dd" to backup the windows partition.
On my laptop, I wanted the WinXP drive to use fat32 vice ntfs. The way I went about it was to spend about an hour on kazaa downloading WinXP. I have a license to use WinXP, and now I have a WinXP CD. It may not be legal, but it is completely ethical.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
I read this article yesterday. I promptly emailed the editor. Here is a copy of my email.
r esize. html
To Whom it May Concern:
I have recently read an article on your website claiming there is no way
to set up a dual-boot system on the new toshiba laptop. This is not true.
There are now non-destructive ntfs filesystem resizing tools for linux.
I personally used a live-CD to resize my windows partition before installing
debian. I know that Mandrake comes with the tools by default and has the
option for resizing windows partitions (NTFS) from the installer.
here is a link to the FAQ:
http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/ntfs
I hope you can attach an editor's note so future readers will not be
misled by this article.
thank you,
david tansey
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
If you have to reinstall Windows, it'll kill your existing Linux partition because it will overwrite the drive with its image.
That is not entirely correct. If you put your Linux install far enough back on the disk it will still be there. The Toshiba recovery program only makes the filesystem, it does not destructively format the disk, so only the first couple of gigs get overwritten. I sort of stumbled onto this little gem with my Toshiba last year. I had bought WindowsXP (please no flames, this was before I heard about Linux), formatted the drive, split it to two 10 BB partitions and installed XP. Several months later I learned of Linux and installed it on the second disk.
I realized that XP was just God-awful slow and decided I wanted to restore the original WinMe (since I wasn't using it for anything other than a few old games) and give away the XP CD to someone who would actually use it. I hadn't tweaked my Linux install too much, so I was planning on reinstalling after restoring Windows. As I read the documentation for parted I noticed that there was a rescue command, so I booted to parted, printed the partition table and copied it down. I then restored windows, resized the C: drive back to the size I had it at before and then rescued my Linux partition. I mounted the Linux partition, and ran 'chroot /mnt/linux lilo' and I was good to go.
I don't know if this will still work with the newer recovery DVDs, but I don't see why it wouldn't.
There's also the support issue. If you give "average" users one and only one way to load their software, it simplifies your support procedure in many ways. When you let them do custom installations from setup CDs, there are many more variables you have to consider during support calls. I can't blame them for trying to make the process as simple as possible.
If profit margins in the PC market are as razor-thin as some say, you can be sure that any extra expense in manufacturing, distribution and support will be passed on to the customers as higher prices.