Just got a new shiney Dell, pre installed with Vista. However, I am worried about mucking up this installation if I use openSUSE to reformat my hdd.
What precautions can I make, or would you reccomend using a VM for openSUSE. Thinking of VMware Server as this is free, and looking to possibly play with a local website service for my LAN, and then possibly host the full site online.
Also, just to have a play to see what openSUSE is doing now a days.
The best experience will come from installing Suse direct (not virtual). That can be safe if you make space on the first hard drive (if there is only one drive). But you must make the space by shrinking the vista partition/a from inside vista. Do not let Suse installer shrink the NTFS partitions, do it first from vista. If you allow 15Gb minimum for Suse (make that space at end of the drive 15Gb or more) then Suse should detect that and partition it appropriately. But if it suggests to alter the vista partitions in any way, stop it immediately (should be ok though).
On Fri, 2008-09-12 at 09:06 +0000, tompickles wrote:
> Just got a new shiney Dell, pre installed with Vista. However, I am
> worried about mucking up this installation if I use openSUSE to reformat
> my hdd.
>
> What precautions can I make, or would you reccomend using a VM for
> openSUSE. Thinking of VMware Server as this is free, and looking to
> possibly play with a local website service for my LAN, and then possibly
> host the full site online.
>
> Also, just to have a play to see what openSUSE is doing now a days.
>
>
I just did an openSUSE 11.0 on a Vista Business new HP machine…
no problems with dual booting.
Did you get proper restore media from Dell? Dell’s restores are
usually close to real media (better than the funky stuff that HP
and others do).
You can certainly use VMware Server, but my experience is that it’s
a dog under Vista (experience again, I just did one of these on a
new 6710b laptop from HP… it works… but a bit slow… Vista
churns for a LONG time before the VMware Server becomes relatively
responsive… no such issues with Linux as the host).
However, I do like have both environments at the same time. I prefer
having Linux as the host with Vista/XP as the guest under a VM
though.
If you’re really paranoid, make an image backup of your disk
before you play around on it. Then if you nuke it, you can
recover fully to the way things were.
>From a Linux rescue it’s as simply as
cp /dev/sda path-to/my-recovery-image.img
Then to restore, as long as path-to was something
separate (duh) then the disk you’re backing up:
cp path-to/my-recovery-image.img /dev/sda
to restore. Now… that’s a full disk restore,
which means you have to have room for the whole
disk (e.g. if the disk is 1TB, you just imaged
1TB of data).
There a lot of ways of doing this though… and
there are Windows tools out there… some work,
others don’t… some your friend will tell you will
work and it will eat your machine… etc…etc…
I’ll assume you know your way around Windows… if
not, then I suggest you just keep the restore CDs
on a shelf… move straight to Linux and forget
about Vista.
Yeh, i know my way around windows - and getting used to vista, which isnt that much different. although, the Ubuntu WUBI is tempting…