I have a Windows 7 laptop that I want to make dual boot with CentOS 6.2. My plan was to use the Windows Disk Management tool to partition the disk, but I do not have the needed admin rights on the box to use that. Has anyone used the partitioning tool that comes with 6.2 to do this? Can I have some level of confidence that it will not mess things up so that I cannot boot into Windows? if it screws up and makes Windows unbootable that would be a Very Bad Thing. Thanks! -larry
On 01/30/2012 03:14 PM, Larry Martell wrote:> I have a Windows 7 laptop that I want to make dual boot with CentOS > 6.2. My plan was to use the Windows Disk Management tool to partition > the disk, but I do not have the needed admin rights on the box to use > that. Has anyone used the partitioning tool that comes with 6.2 to do > this? Can I have some level of confidence that it will not mess things > up so that I cannot boot into Windows? if it screws up and makes > Windows unbootable that would be a Very Bad Thing. > > Thanks! > -larryFirst make backup of the MBR (some Linux software save them elsewhere on the disk.) I used CentOS 6.2 DVD to partition Windows 7 partitons, amongst all others. But take notice that regular CentOS DVD/LiveDVD has no ntfs support so you will not be able to format them with NTFS. You can however create them as FAT32 and re-format them from windows. CentOS 6.2 DVD can also align partitions for new 4k sector HDD's -- Ljubomir Ljubojevic (Love is in the Air) PL Computers Serbia, Europe Google is the Mother, Google is the Father, and traceroute is your trusty Spiderman... StarOS, Mikrotik and CentOS/RHEL/Linux consultant
On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 8:14 AM, Larry Martell <larry.martell at gmail.com> wrote:> I have a Windows 7 laptop that I want to make dual boot with CentOS > 6.2. My plan was to use the Windows Disk Management tool to partition > the disk, but I do not have the needed admin rights on the box to use > that. Has anyone used the partitioning tool that comes with 6.2 to do > this? Can I have some level of confidence that it will not mess things > up so that I cannot boot into Windows? if it screws up and makes > Windows unbootable that would be a Very Bad Thing.If you have space somewhere to save a backup, you can boot a clonezilla-live CD and do a disk->image copy that will save your current partitioning and content. It can connect to the image storage via nfs, windows file sharing, or ssh, and it knows enough about most filesystems including ntfs to only save the used portions of the partitions. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
On Monday 30 January 2012, Larry Martell <larry.martell at gmail.com> wrote:> I have a Windows 7 laptop that I want to make dual boot with CentOS > 6.2. My plan was to use the Windows Disk Management tool to partition > the disk, but I do not have the needed admin rights on the box to use > that. Has anyone used the partitioning tool that comes with 6.2 to do > this? Can I have some level of confidence that it will not mess > things up so that I cannot boot into Windows? if it screws up and > makes Windows unbootable that would be a Very Bad Thing.I use System Rescue CD, http://www.sysresccd.org/ , for this task. Before starting, use Windows's defragmenter, as Mark suggested. I suggest preparing a Windows system repair disk, http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Create-a-system-repair-disc , if you can; if not, I suggest getting Hiren's Boot CD, http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/ , even though I'm not convinced that all the programs on the CD can be freely redistributed. Then boot from the System Rescue CD, start X, and use GParted to resize the Windows partition, making it smaller and creating free space for CentOS. Then reboot from the CentOS installation DVD, making sure to create a custom partition layout so as to create a new Linux partition in the space you freed up. -- Yves Bellefeuille <yan at storm.ca> "La Esperanta Civito ne rifuzas anticipe la kunlaboron de erarintoj, se ili konscias pri sia eraro." -- Heroldo Komunikas, n-ro 473.
On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 7:44 PM, Larry Martell <larry.martell at gmail.com> wrote:> I have a Windows 7 laptop that I want to make dual boot with CentOS > 6.2. My plan was to use the Windows Disk Management tool to partition > the disk, but I do not have the needed admin rights on the box to use > that.In a way it is good that you don't have admin access for Windows 7 (which BTW can be solved with many of the system rescue CDs out there). On one install of Windows 7, the partition manager of the Windows 7 installer left a gap of about 70MB in the middle of it's 100MB admin partition and the main C: partition. I don't know the rationale behind it but there was a 70MB of disk space of not much practical use to anybody. Some may argue that 70MB may be small change in a 500GB disk but to me it is 70MB of wasted space that could be part of some other partition. Use it at your own risk. I realigned the partitions with Gparted. Windows 7 complained the FS needed to repaired. I popped in the Win 7 DVD, repaired it's FS and it booted fine. -- Arun Khan