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Installing with
Resized Hard-Drive - Part 1
SATA Hard Drive for: Mepis 6 DVD | Mepis 6.04 Beta 3 | Mepis 64 Beta 3 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 3 disc. The installation platform is: Socket 754 Athlon64 2800+ | 1gig DDR 400mhz | Radeon x1900 AIW | Nforce 4 Chipset The lead off picture this time is a bit different. The disk in use this time is a 160gig Serial ATA Drive from Hitachi. It just came out of the box and installed Windows 2000 Professional on it. As we can see below, Windows 2000 only installed on about 130gigs of the drive. We can also see next to the drive information the device manager and the long list of devices that are currently either not installed or using generic drivers. So, the next time some person runs their mouth about how much easier Windows is to start with, show them this guide. And, no, the other Windows NT 5, Windows XP, isn't any better from the start.  1: Here I skipped the 4 steps to open up qtparted. If you need to see those, simple glance over to the IDE installation guide. Where as the IDE guide had /dev/hda our Serial ATA drive is showing up as /dev/sda Left Click on /dev/sda  2: Here we have our drive information show up. Unlike Microsoft Windows which could not see all of the drive from the start, Mepis Linux does. Lets start resizing. Left Click on the ntfs active partition  3: The ntfs active partition should now be highlighted in blue. Right Click on the ntfs active partition to bring up the context menu  4: From our context menu Left Click on Resize  5: As in the IDE guide, qtparted defaults to showing size in megabytes.  6: I'm going to change the size listing to GB for gigabyte  7: And here it is again, our 128gig drive.  8: I'm going to change that 128gig to a 100gig entry.  9: Left Click on OK  10: As before we now see our ntfs partition set to a solid red. Left Click on the free partition.  11: The free partition should now be highlighted. Now this next session is going to incorporate an /undo function. We'll go into this in more depth during the Merge Install. Right Click on the free partition to bring up the context menu.  12: Left Click on Create  13: Once again qtparted measures in MB.  14: and once again I am going to change to GB  15: I am going to set a drive size as 10gig.  17: Alright, I want to stop here for a second and talk about partition limitations. In the IDE guide I just created a logical partition for no apparent reason. Here, I skipped the step. We'll go into this in more detail in the Merge Installation guide, but for now, I want to go over the Undo-Function qtparted includes.  18: The Undo function is found in the upper left hand corner of qtparted as a green arrow. Undo will take you back a step, so if you want to make one partition a different size than was originally chosen, you can. Left Click on Undo  19: Now we see that we are back to the originally resized NTFS partition. Left Click on the free partition  20: Right Click on the free partition to bring up the context menu Left Click on Create  21: This time we need to change the Primary Partition to Extended Partition  22: As in the IDE guide, we see that the partition type is now grayed out.  23: Left click on OK  Continue on with creating the partitions in Part 2. I just want to see the install itself, can I go to Part 3? Take me back to the Guides. |