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Installing with
Resized Hard-Drive - Part 1
Merged Home / Root for: Mepis 6 Series by: je.saist Preparation Guides: Before a FAT32 or NTFS drive with Windows install can be resized there are numerous steps that need to be taken to prepare Microsoft Windows to be resized. This Guide presumes that the CCleaner, Check Disk, and Defragment Guides have been completed. CCleaner
| Check
Disk | Defragment
| Regseeker
| WinASO
Resize
Part 1 | Resize
Part 2 | Resize Part 3
Now, I personally am not a fan of resizing a hard-drive with Windows Installed on it in order to install Mepis. I strongly recommend that you do not resize a hard-drive to install any linux. Following
this Guide WILL
PUT YOUR INFORMATION AT RISK.
Not MAY, it WILL. That being said, I understand that not everybody can afford an extra hard drive for their computer, and sometimes resizing the hard drive is the only realistic option available. So, make sure you Backup all your Windows Information before you begin. Be prepared to Re-install Windows into the resized partition even if the data survives the resizing process. This guide is built using the Mepis 64 Beta 4 disc. The installation platform is: Socket 754 Athlon64 2800+ | 1gig DDR 400mhz | Radeon x1900 AIW | Nforce 4 Chipset Alright, here we go with the final install guide. This one, as stated above, uses the just released Mepis64 Beta 4 disc. This is the same platform that the Serial ATA guide was built on. We'll also go more into depth on the Partition format limit, something was touched on in both the IDE and SATA guides. Now, why would you want to run /home and /root on the same physical partition? The simple answer is space. Not everybody has 60gig+ drives sitting in their computers. Sometimes there just isn't enough space to give both /home and /root their own partition. So, while we'll be using a modern SATA drive with about 160gigs, merging /home and /root really needs to be done on hard-drives with under 10gigs of space, or on 15-20gig drives where you would want half of the drive to go to Microsoft Windows. 1: So here we go, starting from the Beta 4 Desktop. Left Click on Mepis Install  2: The Mepis License Agreement. Check I agree to the Terms  3: Left Click on Next  4: the Mepis disk selection screen.  5: Left Click on Run QTParted  6: Wait for qtparted to load. I'm going to go ahead and maximize qtparted.  7: A little easier on the eyes? Left Click on /dev/sda (or /dev/hda on an IDE system)  8: We can see that this is the same drive used before in the original SATA drive. However, this time the ntfs partition has been set to cover all of the drive. I won't bother trying to explain Microsoft's odd partition system, I don't think I can.  9: Left Click on the active ntfs partition (or fat32 for Windows 95 / 98 / ME)  10: Right Click to bring up the context menu  11: Left Click on Resize  12: As shown in the other guides, qtparted starts with the size set in Megabytes  13: I'm going to change the size GB for Gigabytes. The system now shows a size of 153.36 gigs.  14: Now I've set our New Size to be 100gigs.  15: Left Click on OK  16: Now I've given myself a free partition with about 53.38gigs Left Click on the free partition  17: The free partition should now be highlighted. The Majority of the space on the free partition will be used for our merged /home and /root segments  18: Right Click on the free partition bring up the context menu  19: Left Click on Create  20: We should now be looking at our Create a Partition box, with a Size of 53.38gig  21: I am going to change the size to 52.38 What you want to do is just change the size to leave enough for the swap partition. If you have under 10gigs of drive space available, set a swap of 512megs instead. If you are under 5gigs of drive space, keep the swap around 256megs. It won't be fast, but the drive is probably an ATA-33 anyways.  22: Left Click on Ok  23: We now have a free partition of about 1gig left.  24: Right Click on the free partition to bring up the context menu  25: Left Click on Create  26: Since this is our /swap partition, we need to make sure to change the Partition Type  27: Once the linux-swap type has been set, Left Click on OK.  28: Our two partitions are now set, time to click on the Commit button. Left Click on the floppy disk icon in the upper left hand corner.  29: qtparted will ask for confirmation and warn to unmount the drives Left Click on Yes.  30: Wait for qtparted to report Operations completed successfully. Then Left Click on OK  31: Our drive is now formatted, and we can see that the ntfs drive has returned to normal. Go ahead and Close qtparted.  I'm ready to install Mepis Linux by following Part 2. Partition Research? Why is that in Part 3? Take me back to the Guides. |