OK Guys I know it’s been asked a thousand times before, but, is there and easy way to dump windows from a dual boot - resize partitions for my suse 11.2 and re-install grub without reloading suse, or would it just be easier to delete windows re-install suse keeping my home partition and then resize with gparted ???
Open a su terminal and do this
fdisk -l
post result and we will see
The short answer is “yes”, there’s no way I’d ever re-install, just to get rid of windows.
I’d probably just shrink the XP partition from Live CD, create a new filesystem and copy some data in to free up space, with "rsync -caxS source /mnt/target
Then you can use a bind mount to “splice” in the file system to where it is ‘meant’ to be.
/work/cache/wwwoffle /var/spool/wwwoffle auto bind 0 0
That was a mount that moved out a web cache, from /var into a more suitable area for GB’s of mostly small (and some very large) temporary files. It might be a great way to store your home directory on the fastest disk (an SSD perhaps?) without it being noticeable to those who wouldn’t understand the need to do such things …
Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xa9016789
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 1306 10490413+ 12 Compaq diagnostics
/dev/sda2 1307 10405 73080551+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 * 10406 19457 72710190 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 19083 19457 3012156 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6 10406 13016 20972794+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 13017 19082 48725113+ 83 Linux
Just so we can see this easier:
Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xa9016789
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 1306 10490413+ 12 Compaq diagnostics
/dev/sda2 1307 10405 73080551+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 * 10406 19457 72710190 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 19083 19457 3012156 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6 10406 13016 20972794+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 13017 19082 48725113+ 83 Linux
I’m not sure. How about you John. Can he delete the windows partitions and expand the extended in to the free space? Then re-size the logicals?
Sounds unlikely…
I’ll test it in the morning if no one has come up with an answer.
You probably need to hang on to the utility partition sda1.
You’ve got about 75Gb in the windows partition (sda2).
Here’s one option:
You could simply format it to a Linux format, e.g. ext3, and mount it as extra storage at e.g. /music (or whatever) and after it’s mounted change the ownership over to you using like this:
sudo chown charlie:users /music
Here’s another:
Boot off any live CD that contains GParted (e.g. Ubuntu Live, GParted Live) and delete sda2. Move the other partitions to the “left” on the GParted GUI. While doing that, make the root and home of Suse bigger, then click to make it “apply”. That might take some hours to complete and is quite dangerous for new users so back up the important data first.
Then you’ll have a broken bootloader and a broken fstab. You fix those with the openSUSE installation DVD’s “repair installed system” module.
The first option is by far the simplest.
Hi Carl, you must have been posting while I was typing. Yes it’s all do-able as you suggest. Takes ages to complete. And is so very risky for new users because of the possibilities fior finger fumbles. The repair of the broken fstab and Grub is straightforward but dangerous for new users too, hence crucial need for backup of data to an external drive first.
Well I am planning to do a move forward of beginning of an extended partition on a Windows disk, where C:\ has been shrunk.
The only tool I’d trust to do this is sfdisk(8) in dump partition table mode,and then I’d hack things to create an extra logical partition. Whilst I’m confident about restoring partitions with this method, I am not sure if inserting a new logical is a safe proposition.
In my case, I cannot simply format the unused space as a physhical partition, because the extended part. is #4 with 3 Win OEM partions to reckon with.
Here no space is gained by moving beginning of extended, which could contain a boot loader anyway, in order to create an sda5 logical.
So simply doing a mkfs(8) on sda2 to replace XP is by far the quickest and safest solution.