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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.
Doing it that way is great for normal people that don't know alot about computers. It's a real PAIN for people who do. :(
What's to prevent you from installing XP once, using something like Partition Magic to resize the partitions, and then installing Linux or whatever? Seems to me the only evil thing about this is that reinstalling XP might be a pain?
Almost every laptop sold nowadays only come with restore cds, they never EVER come with a full copy of windows. HECK nowadays HP and Compaqs just have a partition called RESTORE PARTITION, and thats the only way to restore them because they come with NO DISKS! You have to contact HP or COMPAQ to request them for a small fee. And even then, they are only restore cds. Basicly your just paying for a licence. Which means legally you can go to Kazaa and download a Win2k ISO and just use the licence you payed for. Simple....
keanmarine.com
Why not just borrow a full install disk of XP from a friend? Surely this is a good example of fair use, considering you already own a license to the operating system, albeit a different copy.
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Dell lets you go through a standard OS install. And it is because of OEM licensing. M$ apparently doesn't produce OEM CDs for their OEMs, telling them to make their own. Dell's CD simply checks to make sure you have a Dell BIOS on the system, so you can only use the CDs on other Dells (vendor-specific, not model-specific).
Oh, come on now.... I really do like Apple's new product line, and can think of MANY reasons to buy a new Powerbook G5. But this isn't really a legitimate one.
In fact, in the past, Apple was notorious for selling systems that included specialized CDs of customized MacOS just for that particular system. If you tried to install a generic MacOS of the same version, you'd run into problems unless you downloaded special extensions called "system enablers" and copied them over.
I know this isn't the case any more with OS X, but still - Apple likes to ship Powerbooks with "Recovery CDs" instead of giving you seperate application CDs of all the software packages bundled. I hate it when all I want to do is install one specific app - and my only option is to do a full system restore to get it.
My sister and I bought identical HP computers a while back, and after some troubles we needed the rescue CDs, and HP was more than happy to send rescue CDs to us, just not the right ones. Long story short, I have 6 sets of rescue CDs in my office that do me no good, and a company I'll never buy computer parts from again.
The other problem is that with the model of HP I had (and assumably most other models as well) you had to buy a special copy of windows directly from HP (presumably with a huge markup on an already over priced product..) in order to get most versions of windows to work at all.
Moral of the story is, plans like these hurt the consumers and help create/maintain monopolies. It's too bad THESE situations wouldn't get taken to court...
Shoot Pixels, Not People!
here's a few options 1. Don't buy that lappy 2. Partition Magic 3. Buy a copy of XP media on CD from M$, explain that you already have a license and just need the media. (good luck, but it can be done)
Not necessarily true. Windows does have to be in the first partition of the first hard drive, or else it will bitch, but Grub can map out the partitions and drives in such a way that Windows "thinks" it's the first partition of the first hard drive.
No, Windows is not in the hardware as some posters think. Just imagine if it were. It would require several gigs of non-volatile memory just for the disk image; and how long would it take a BIOS to blit that to a drive? No no no. Use some common sense people.
;)
Instead, this is merely an FYI story about a person who bought a notebook, expecting to have a bona fide OEM cd to install XP home. Well, it's been years since MS has shipped OEM versions of their OS with major brand notebooks. Instead, it's the industry standard to get a system restore CD.
But here's a solution. You can install XP Home on that new notebook, and use fips (available here among other places), or Partition Magic if you want to pay money, to shrink the partition. You should then have enough space to install linux.
Alternatively You can just hit packetnews.org and search for a nice ISO of XP Home. Fire up your favorite xdcc-capable IRC client, and you're set. Download and install. It's not 100% legal, but WTF. You got shafted on the notebook sourceware, and by getting an ISO, MS is not losing a cent; they already got paid once for the non-working XP Home that can with the notebook. So fsck 'em. (Plus, if you're running linux instead of a *bsd, you're probably into 'pirating' ^H^H^H^H^H^H exercising your freedom anyway.)
After a few years of swapping MP3z, you'll eventually grow up and switch to a dangerously dedicated 'bsd notebook anyway.
Is it illegal to download an XP Home ISO, if you own the license? I do not consider such rubbish. You have a license to use Windows, get the media in whatever way you like.
On my desktop box, when I reinstalled XP, reformatted both NTFS partitions, but left the ext3, FAT32 and swap the heck alone.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
i generally try to put my operating system loaders on the partition of the relevent os. XP gets ntloader on its partition, linux gets lilo on its... then i put debian mbr on the mbr so i can pick which partition to boot from.
/dev/hda and i'm able to pick and choose my os easily again
if something (most likely windows) fucks w/ my mbr, i just have to set the linux partition active, reboot and do install-mbr
windows installs have overwritten my mbr way too many times for me to put stuff the system depends on in there
Need a Catering Connection
the reason computer makers utilise these "restore" disks is for their main customers, people who have no clue and just want to be able to point and click
Well the restore disk for my laptop creates an 8 GB partition on my 21 GB hard disk (erasing all previously existing partitions). Go explain how to fix that to "pepople who have no clue". The only "positive" point is that it doesn't require activation.
My sister and her husband bought an absolutely horrendous piece of crap Packard Bell several years ago. It came with one of these lovely discs that wipe your HD and restor it to a "factory state". (Windows, with a sheitload of annoying, not to mention buggy, PackardBell spam and adware)
At some point the computer finally gave up and collapsed under the weight of all the spamware it had been subjected to. They gave me a call and asked me to come over and take a look at it. I told them I'd pop over later on in the evening. Unfortunately, my brother-in-law decided he'd try to fix it before I got there... with Packard Bell's image disc. Financial records, their digital cam photo collection, my sisters grades (she's a teacher), and a thousand other useful things... Gone. Toast. Whoops! I took a red magic marker (the kind teachers seem to have oodles of) and labelled the offending disc "EVIL!". That was about all I could do.
I'm sure my sister and her husband are not the only tech-unsavvy people who have fallen victim to these image discs of EVIL, and they've never even heard of Linux! These discs have been around for quite some time and I'm sure any manufacturer that uses them gets plenty of tech-support calls as a result. The only reason to use these discs seems to be that they let manufacturers include all sorts of annoying and useless software with their name on it. Frankly, it's a stupid practice and it hurts more than just Linux users.
Just to totally avoid pure FUD, I feel a few things should be noted:
2.) Toshiba's have a problem of having their own "helping" software that when you boot with a net connection it will call home and download "updates" automatically for you. One such update was for my model to cut the clock speed in half.
This was for Intel's Speedstep tech. This cuts the CPU down when the machine is idle in order to conserv on battery life. Mhz programs will read the CPU as half-speed, because your machine isn't doing anythign else...which leads to:
3.) Every toshiba I've owned has horrible battery life, you might as well consider them a computer with a built in UPS and easy to move around, and not a "portable laptop".
I'm not saying it was right for them to force those updates on you, but I hope you can at least see the connection.
It might be less of a problem from people like Dell rather than smaller firms, but I still will never truts a vendor drive image.
What if they have 'conveniently' installed something like Gator on there for you? Or even their own custom internal reporting tool? No thanks.
Now, I know that installing Windows from scratch can be said to be installing spyware (thanks to WMP etc) - but at least the crap it sends out is well documented and you stand a small chance of finding it and stopping it. With a drive image you have no idea what settings are enabled and what software is installed.
Beep beep.