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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.
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
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."
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.
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.
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.