I just bought a Acer Extensa 4420-5239. It has a 120 gb hdd. When I go into the disk management in Vista I see this.
111.79 gb=
partition - 9.77 healthy, EISA Configuration
partition - Acer C: 51.01 gb, healthy. 14gb used for Vista
partition - Data D: 51.01 gb healthy. 1gb used
When I run the Live CD to install, Mint wants to use 47gb of free space. Where is it getting the number? Should I shrink one of the Vista partitions or just let Mint use the 47 gb it wanted to as default installation size? How would openSUSE handle it?
Don’t know what you should do next but the difference may be because Mint calculates using kibibytes and mebibytes, i.e. 1024 bytes and 1,048,576 bytes respectively while Vista uses kilobytes and megabites i.e. 1000 bytes and 1,000,000 bytes respectively.
Mint uses the Debian (well, Ubuntu, but its Debian under the hood) script, which is different than openSUSE’s. IMO the latter is more intelligent. I’ve no idea why the 47GB. But both sometimes try to be too smart for their (more to the point, your) own good.
It’s a bad - very bad - idea to modify Vista partitions with any other OS. Including XP (there are little known disastrous incompatibilities vis-a-vis Vista’s new partition geometries). Fortunately, Vista permits resizing its partitions on-the-fly. But IIRC Vista won’t move them. You should have no problem downsizing D. If you downsize C and then try to upsize D (reclaiming space to D’s left) before downsizing it (effectively trying to move D), I just don’t remember for sure, but I don’t think that will be allowed. Bottom line, you need to end up with unallocated space following the Vista partitions. In that case, usually both the Debian and SuSE scripts will just use that space; remember that the suggestions are only that, you can manually specify the partitioning.
You have to be carefull with Windows partitions. Make sure you defrag MS before setting up your linux partitions.
I have 2 dual boot setups right now XP/openSUSE11 and Vista/Ubuntu. Both run fine and both were created in the Windows C drive. Just take your time and fully understand what you are doing and you should be OK.
I can tell you, I just successfully used the Yast Partitioner during install to resize the Vista install. You have to use Custom partitioning. I had room to take 70GB from the Vista side leaving Vista 70GB. Remember to set a mount point for Vista (eg: /windows).
It all worked flawlessly for me. And Grub booted Vista fine.
I can tell you though. I decided to wipe the disc clean and start fresh. Why?
Vista is a pile of brown steaming stuff
XP is much quicker - I had a genuine XP disc to use too.
It frees up the recovery partition space
It eliminates all the pre-installed rubbish that came with Vista
I only put XP on it because it’s a laptop (Thinkpad R61e). Though I will probably hardly ever use XP. At least it’s there.
Just so you know. Suse11 kde3, installed out of the box, perfect. But then that’s why I bought a Thinkpad.
Don’t expect the same from your machine.
While it is possible to modify Vista partitions with linux (or XP, for that matter), and it is probable that the results will be OK . . . the fact remains that Vista is creating partition table records using a different geometry formula and a different boot sector offset than any prior version of Windows, while XP and linux and even some commercial 3rd-party tools continue to use the traditional starting/ending sector rule. Consequently there are situations where rewriting the table record will result in Vista’s boot manager being unable to find its matching boot loader. In other situations the modification - even by XP - can result in the partition table record being destroyed altogether, rendering that partition and its contents essentially unrecoverable.
It is therefore prudent to not modify its partitions outside of Vista (MS even recommends not doing so with XP), but rather to use Vista’s ability to do on-the-fly resizing in order to free up space, and then let the linux installer simply use that.
I ended up shrinking the D (data) partition, 51 gb for backups and 99% empty, I shrank it in half then after booting into Mint and using GParted I shrank the D partition down to 9 gb and when installing Mint, selected the “Use Continous Free Space” option and all went well. the Mint grub/bootloader had two entries for Vista one pointed to hd0,0 and one to hd0,1 . The hd0,1 was the correct entry and I remmed out the bad one. After three days I have a smooth running Acer laptop w/ Mint and Vista happily sharing the same 120gb hdd.
I did… but I always like a second opinion. Sometimes people in this forum solve other distro problems better than the original forum of the distro. This forum is one of the best.
