Previously I had Windows XP and I.nstalled Opensuse 12.3 on top of it and Grub kept things straight.
Well, after a crash, I reinstalled openSuse 12.3 and had forgotten to install Windows 1st.
So, in an attempt to “fix” things, I installed VirtualBox and Windows XP within it.
That was not a good solution as XP is so painfully slow as to be not useable.
So, can I install XP on top of 12.3 and have Grub keep them straight ? IE so I have a dual boot box. .
Or am I going to have to start fresh, install XP 1st, then 12.3 ? I hope not.
Simple answer: no. Windows XP expects to be on the first partition.
That does not mean it is impossible but you may find it is less hassle to let Windows XP install over openSUSE and then re-install openSUSE. It depends on how much time/skill you have to deal with the potential problems.
Speed in a VM is not bad here though you can’t play high end games because of video. Need to give it lots of memory 512Meg at least also install guest addition. they help
I’m running a AMD 3200+ with 2 gig using 512meg for VM in Virtualbox. This is fine for most apps.
On Wed, 25 Dec 2013 23:46:01 +0000, gogalthorp wrote:
> Speed in a VM is not bad here though you can’t play high end games
> because of video.
And even that’s not such a big deal any more, if the host’s video card
supports it, VirtualBox and VMware both allow you to use accelerated
video - 2D and 3D both.
Well yea 2D and 3D from the addons but really the speed is not there for high end games. But all business apps I have tried work just fine. Maybe if I had a multi-core cpu and 8 gig memory and could give XP 1 gig.
First, is your XP still there in a partition, just not launching? If so, which partition?
Give your fdisk -l output (in a code tag, of course).
If your XP is still there, I can suggest a plan of action.
If not, here is what I would do (depending on your hard disk space, of course, and assuming that you have already set OpenSUSE up and want to keep the settings and other changes you have made):
First, make sure you have leftover disk space for your XP partition. If not, you will need to resize your Linux partitions to leave enough unallocated space for XP. At this point, you don’t care where on the drive this space is.
It is EXTREMELY important, though, that your Linux partitions are the same size or SMALLER than what they are going to be on the final disk layout, since they otherwise won’t restore to a smaller space.
Once you have done that, you then want to back up your OpenSUSE (preferrably to an external drive, or a second internal drive, if you have one, otherwise to a large enough USB stick) using Clonezilla (run from a boot CD or a boot USB key).
Once that is done successfully, wipe your drive and repartition.
If you do it like the following, with 4 partitions (assuming that you don’t want to add anything else on this drive), you can make all 4 partitions as Primary partitions. If you need more than 4 partitions, you will have to make one of the 4 as an extended partition and create the additional partitions as logical partitions.).
First partition is NTFS and set the size you decided for XP. 2nd partition is Ext4 set to a size for OpenSUSE root (I find 15 to 20 Gig is way more than enough space. I have a lot installed in OpenSUSE, and my root is still only about 10-Gigs of data). Add another partition for a separate home partition, makes backups and maintenance more efficient and controllable.
If you do all this with a live OpenSUSE CD, or some other live Linux, you can use Gparted or some other Linux partitioner to take care of all this, and you can then make a Linux Swap partition as a 4th partition.
Once you have done that, install XP to the NTFS partition.
Once XP is installed & running, it is time to restore your OpenSUSE backups with Clonezilla.
Before you do, you will need to make a couple minor adjustments to the backup filenames to work with the changed partition scheme.
In the directory where you created the backups, you will find a file list something like this:
blkdev.list
clonezilla-img
disk
Info-dmi.txt
Info-lshw.txt
... (several other files)
...
... (down to: )
sda1.ext4-ptcl-img.gz.aa
sda1.ext4-ptcl-img.gz.ab
sda1.ext4-ptcl-img.gz.ac
...
...
...
sda2.ext4-ptcl-img.gz.aa
...
... (and so on)
What you need to do here is rename the “sdax” part of the files, if the partition order is different. Let’s assume your root partition that you backed up was sda3, it is represented in the backups as “sda3.ext4-ptcl-img.gz.aa” and so on.
Since your root partition is now sda2, you will want to rename all the sda3??? backup files to sda2???
Do the similar exercise for your backed-up home partition, if you had a separate home partition.
Once you have done that, boot with the Clonezilla device and choose to Restore Partitions from Images (do not Restore full disk, of course), then choose the backup partitions you renamed. Make sure you deselect any Clonezilla options that want to write the MBR or partition table either before or after the image restore. Read the options very carefully.
Once you have restored successfully, you will then need to fix GRUB2. If you need help with that, let us know, and we will be happy to guide you.
On Thu, 26 Dec 2013 00:56:01 +0000, gogalthorp wrote:
> Well yea 2D and 3D from the addons but really the speed is not there for
> high end games. But all business apps I have tried work just fine. Maybe
> if I had a multi-core cpu and 8 gig memory and could give XP 1 gig.
Yeah, that might make a difference. My point really is that people’s
mileage may well vary, and some may find that those high-end games play
pretty well in a VM.
When I said that XP was painfully slow, actually it was TurboTax that was the pain. I have since installed XP and TT on to an Acer Netbook and it runs just fine. Since TT was the only reason that I have VM running, I can see no reason to keep VM around. I guess I could try the game I got for Christmas (Guild Wars 2). but I am not optimistic.
Thank you Fraser for the depth of detail in your post. Here is the result of the fdisk.
Windows is not present and when I installed OS 12.3, I let him have all of sda and located my “home” directory on a different drive.
Given that, it might not be a disaster to reinstall XP, then OS 12.3 and figure out what to do to bring my home directory back into play.
hexdump@Corky-PC:~> su -
Password:
Corky-PC:~ #
Corky-PC:~ #
Corky-PC:~ #
Corky-PC:~ #
Corky-PC:~ # fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 256.1 GB, 256060514304 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 31130 cylinders, total 500118192 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0006150b
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 2048 4192255 2095104 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda2 * 4192256 416227327 206017536 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 416227328 458174463 20973568 83 Linux
Disk /dev/sdb: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders, total 1953525168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0006fdc2
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 2048 1543925759 771961856 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2 1543925760 1584885759 20480000 83 Linux
Disk /dev/sdg: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x9782f9c2
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdg1 2048 976773119 488385536 83 Linux
WARNING: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on '/dev/sdi'! The util fdisk doesn't support GPT. Use GNU Parted.
Disk /dev/sdi: 16.0 GB, 16008609792 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1946 cylinders, total 31266816 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xcee0ec63
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdi1 2048 31266815 15632384 b W95 FAT32
Corky-PC:~ #
On Thu, 26 Dec 2013 13:26:01 +0000, hextejas wrote:
> When I said that XP was painfully slow, actually it was TurboTax that
> was the pain. I have since installed XP and TT on to an Acer Netbook and
> it runs just fine. Since TT was the only reason that I have VM running,
> I can see no reason to keep VM around. I guess I could try the game I
> got for Christmas (Guild Wars 2). but I am not optimistic.
Something that I’ve noticed lately in my XP VM is that svchost.exe seems
to suck up the CPU and cause performance issues - you can kill it in the
Windows task manager, and that would help. Sort the columns by CPU
utilization when you see what looks to be poor performance, and see if
that’s the problem.
Killing it in my VM doesn’t seem to cause any harm.
> When I said that XP was painfully slow, actually it was TurboTax that
> was the pain. I have since installed XP and TT on to an Acer Netbook and
> it runs just fine. Since TT was the only reason that I have VM running,
> I can see no reason to keep VM around. I guess I could try the game I
> got for Christmas (Guild Wars 2). but I am not optimistic.
>
Just be sure that your past-year tax files are backed up to somewhere that
you can access them before you wipe out the VM virtual disk And
remember that TT is NOT very good about accessing past year files with the
current year’s version. I seem to spend more time restoring access to 7
year old filings as I do on doing the current year every time I bring that
sucker up for a new year!
[QUOTE=hendersj;2611606]On Thu, 26 Dec 2013 13:26:01 +0000, hextejas wrote:
> When I said that XP was painfully slow, actually it was TurboTax that
> was the pain. I have since installed XP and TT on to an Acer Netbook and
> it runs just fine. Since TT was the only reason that I have VM running,
> I can see no reason to keep VM around. I guess I could try the game I
> got for Christmas (Guild Wars 2). but I am not optimistic.
Something that I’ve noticed lately in my XP VM is that svchost.exe seems
to suck up the CPU and cause performance issues - you can kill it in the
Windows task manager, and that would help. Sort the columns by CPU
utilization when you see what looks to be poor performance, and see if
that’s the problem.
Killing it in my VM doesn’t seem to cause any harm.
Jim
Had that too but the last Windows update seems to corrected it
First, back up your home partition (I still suggest Clonezilla, but if you are comfortable using dd in command line, you could also do it that way.).
Then, just blow your partitions away on the OS drive to eliminate any ghosts or demons lurking around, reinstall XP, reinstall OpenSUSE and have it choose the home partition you already have set up. (When it suggests partitions during the install, you can customize those before proceeding. You can also set it to not format the home partition, and probably won’t need to restore from your backup.)
Maybe simple to you but I remember going through a lot of hoops to get Opensuse as I wanted it after installing the SSD.
Lessee, I remember doing something to, was it fstab ? And I can’t remember what.
Also Thunderbird mail client, CUPS, the backup script, and I am sure there were more that required some tweaking. I am going to see if I can make a list so that I can be forearmed.
What folder on SDA will have anything that I have customized ? Prolly more than one.
For the most part personal configuration are in your home. system configurations are in /etc
There maybe some esoteric others but /etc is a good thing to backup but just use it as a reference rather then a full restore if you are installing fresh
SSD’s require special handling because of the limited write life of flash memory. So if they contain files that are updated a lot the life of the device is reduced. So such files as logs and caches are best put on rotating rust drives. Also best to turn things like recording the time that a file is last accessed should be off also to reduce unneeded writes.
Of course you can ignore all that and just uses them like a normal HDD but you cut years off their life expectancy
My point really is that people’s