Simply Mepis 6.0-1 dual boot with W XP Pro on one hard drive

Hi cramp. I'm guessing that that second partition is a "restore" partition of Windows XP. If all goes to heck in a hand truck then many dealers have a "restore" function. Of course, upon restore the end-user has lost everything, but "Hey, doesn't that operating system look cool!"

What brand/model laptop is it and do you have any separate restore/recovery disks for the box?

If you have recovery disks, I would first try defragging Windows and shrinking sda1 to a reasonable size. Then move sda2 down so there's no gap between the two partitions. Since you will need to create at least two new partitions for Mepis (swap and root), you might as well create the new partition as "extended" and put the swap and root partitions in "logical" partitions. So /dev/sda1, and /dev/sda2 would remain the same. You would add /dev/sda3, that would be unusable but split into /dev/hda5, and /dev/hda6 (logical paritions always start at "5").

If you don't have recovery disks, then you might try to shrink sda1 down and "insert" a partition in between sda1 and sda2. Why? Because the current /dev/sda2 might need to stay in exactly that place. I don't know for sure. EnigmaOne?

If you need to make and move multiple partitions, I would recommend that you consider downloading and burning GParted Live CD. It's pretty good at multi-partition "magic"

Jon

Thanks for the fast response, Jon!!

It's a Lenovo Thinkpad R 60 and no, these days they don't give you a recovery disk, as, they put it in the system. I'm still a firm belive in floppy diskettes, though;-) for when things get real bad.

I'm going to try it tomorrow or the next day when I go get the laptop.

Thanks again for the information and help! So appreciated!

Lisa

This is from the manual:
"Instead of providing a recovery CD or a Wndws CD with your computer, Lenovo provided simpler methods of accomplishing the tasks typically associated wtih these CDs. blah blah..
The complete backup of all the files and programs that Lenovo preinstalled on your computer resides in a hidden protected area, or partition, of the hard disk. Although hidden, the back ups in the partition consume hard disk space. Therefore, when checking the capacity of your hard disk according to Wndws, you might note that the total capacity of the disk appears to be smaller than anticipated."

I copied the disk information in my first post using Qtparted.

I often use Ranish Partition Manager.

Thanks Cramp for the info. If you have some means to "image" the new hard drive I would do it! Make the backup before you do anything at all to the new computer. Use the dd command, partimage, or some other means to copy the whole darned thing somewhere else. I know it's possible to copy and compress the image so that it doesn't take up too much space. And by making a copy of each partition then you can blow one/other/both away but still restore them if you need them. It's not exactly like having a recovery disk, but pretty close.

Jon