Compaq is pissing me off

[Jerry Feldman]

On Sun, 15 Jun 2008 14:58:52 -0400 (EDT)
TARogue <tom at tarogue.net> wrote:

> I have a Compaq Presario SR1620NX running Windows XP. I used Acronis
> Disk Director Suite 10.0 to repartition my harddrive and installed
> Fedora Core 9. Once it was fully installed and configured I rebooted
> back to the XP partition. I was immediately redirected to "System
> Recovery"
> 
> I ended having to boot back to Linux, mount the NTFS filesystem, backup 
> the entire partition and do a complete wipe & reinstall. Once that was 
> done, I "rescued" linux by reinstalling grub. With grub in place i can 
> get back to Linux (YAY!) but Windows is demanding a System Restore 
> again.
> 
> The reason I'm blaming Compaq is because I've not had this problem on 
> ANY of my other XP/Fedora dual boot systems. Can anyone tell me how I 
> can get this to work?

it certainly is not Compaq's fault. First, the Disk Director is a waste
of $49. A Linux live CD, such as Knoppix, has the tools to properly
resize a Windows NTFS partition. 

One of the things I do at installfests is to first make sure the NTFS
is fully defragmented. The next thing I do is to resize it with
QTParted. Then, before I do anything else, I boot into Windows to make
sure it boots. It may require repair since it will think it has been
shutdown improperly. 

Once you can boot Windows without a problem, then you can use your
Linux distro, or parted to allocate your partitions. For years I used
Partition Magic because it was the only one I trusted until GNU Parted
(and QTParted) came up to speed. 

Also note on many Windows systems, including Dell and Compaq, there is
a hidden recovery partition. 

Additionally, with new systems today, I would prefer virtualization
over dual boot. If you are a heavy Windows user and want to try Linux,
you can install something like VMWare or Virtualbox on Windows and run
Linux as a guest. Or, you can completely blow Windows away and install
VMWare or Virtualbox on Linux with Windows as the guest. This is my
preferred way since you have the benefit of Linux' stability and better
file system.  in my case there are a few cases where I may need Windows
and cannot use WINE. But, running Windows in a VM on a reasonably
powerful system works decently. 


-- 
--
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id: 537C5846
PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB  CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846
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