[plug] installing linux cont.

[Brad Campbell]

chris sisman wrote:
> Tried to install kbunto, seemed very fast with all the bits I need.
> Stopped halfway and blocked xp.
> New it company. in Albany adverising linux, so aranged for them to 
> install linux on one drive leave xp on the other.
> Pony tail arived took 3 goes to get kubunto, trouble was on the drive 
> that HAD xp.
> So all my stuff gone....photos correspondance the lot.
> Left with me re installing xp.....had to take kububto off again to get xp.
> Charged $40 min fee.
> My husband went balistic, got my $40 back.with lots of verbal. I,m not 
> even allowed to dust his pc now, good job we have one each.
> the firm is Dazzak computers,222, Chester Pass rd.albany.
> So looks like its curtains for linux and me after months of trying.
> Taken me a week to put my pc. to rights.


Bugger.. whereas I just installed Ubuntu on my girlfriends laptop.

Boot into XP and defrag disk several times. Install WinHex and zero all unused parts of the disk.
Boot into Knoppix and backup drive with dd if=/dev/sda bs=1M | gzip -9 | nc mymachine to do a 
complete image backup just in case..

Boot into gparted tool disk. Resize NTFS partition down to 15GB, create a new NTFS partition of 
about 29G, create extended partition with a 1GB swap and 10GB ext3 partition and commit all changes.
Boot into XP to make sure it's all good.. XP boots, checks drives and comes up with the new 
parition. All good..

Boot into Ubuntu installer, have it install in /dev/sda6 using /dev/sda5 as swap and telling it not 
to touch sda[123]. Edit grub boot menu to boot XP by default..

Whammo.. all good.. she can now boot into ubuntu (though I'm buggered if I can get the screen 
resolution up to 1280x800 so she's stuck at 1024x768 for now) and play with linux as she requested, 
but still boots into XP to do her work until she gets used to openoffice and the other groovy linux 
toys. Interestingly enough her wifi card (2200 Pro) is a pig and unreliable in windows but works 
just fine in linux :)

For doing full image backups of windows machines, defrag and winhex make a great combination. Winhex 
allows you to zero all free space, slack space and best of all, unused space in the MFT (which can 
be quite significant) allowing gzip to really crunch the drive image down nicely.
She has a 60G drive that had about 18G used.. and the total drive image size came to 7.9G.

I'm sure it's no news to most of you.. but just in case..

On my machine (which is being used as somewhat of a removable hard disk really) I just use..

nc -l -p 5050 | pipebench > target.file.name

and on the remote machine

dd if=/dev/[sh]da bs=1M | gzip -9 | nc mymachine 5050

bzip2 often provides much better compression, but it becomes a tradeoff of space vs speed. I had the 
space and needed the speed.

pipebench is a groovy little app here also as it displays current speed, average speed and number of 
bytes transferred..

As your pony tail dude discovered the hard way, it's always good to make *complete* backups prior to 
doing any mind bending stuff with partitions.. and it always allows time for a nice meal and a 
coffee :) (my last effort took 90 mins to zero the partitions and about another 60 do perform the 
backup)

I've never had to use a backup yet, but I always create them.. for sure the day I do something 
without a safety net it will fail in bad ways..

Brad (Mr "Play it Safe")
-- 
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