[plug] [-: OT: On Topic :-] Nifty idea for dual booters

[Leon Brooks]

On Tue, 20 Aug 2002 16:10, Brad Campbell wrote:
> The 9x's compress better because you can Zero the unused space on the
> drive before you re-compress.

Try zeroing the partition before you install the first time.

    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda2

Get Windows to do a Quick format rather than a thorough one. If you're testing 
XP on a VFAT partition (or trust NTFS) you could use SpeeDisk user a 
different version of Windows or just make an immeanse file full of 0 to fill 
up the remaining space, either with a small 'doze program or dd under Linux:

    mount -t vfat /dev/hda2 win
    dd if=/dev/zero of=win/fullof.0
    rm -f win/fullof.0
    umount win
    dd if=/dev/hda2 | gzip > winxp.partition.gz

Not perfect, but a decided improvement on no zeroing.

Cheers; Leon