Hi.

My laptop currently has a 60-gig hard drive. It is partitioned into 3 parts (30 + 7 + 20).

I also have a 500-gig Seagate external USB 2.0 hard drive.

I have Ghost 12.

I have swapped out many desktop drives, but never a laptop drive.

Anybody done this?

The new drive is Western Digital 160-gigger.

I'd like to also make room on it for a Linux installation (Ubuntu?)

I'm thinking something like this:

C: 30 GB
D: Optical
Linux: 20 GB (not sure what file system will be best)
E: 50 GB
F: 50 GB (whatever is remaining)

all NTFS except Linux.

Back up Ghost 12 of C to external Segate
Swap out old for new
Partition
Restore
???
Does G12 have partitioning capabilities?

Should I repartition (with Partition Magic) AFTER restoring image of C (which contains PM)??

Am open to all ideas.

New drive should be here in a day or two.

Rad,

Changing a laptop HD is easier than doing it in a desktop. You laptop manual will tell you which screw to undo.

I assume you already have an image of your C drive and backups of your data partitions. This is what I'd do...

Swap HDs
Partition the new HD with your PM boot CD
Delete the first partition so it's unallocated space
Boot from the Ghost 12 CD and restore your image to the unallocated space and choose "Resize restored drive" so that there will no unallocated space left over
Boot to WinXP and copy over your data backups

Done...

Rad wrote on Jul 21^st, 2008 at 8:31pm:

Anybody done this?

Yup, although never with the V2i toolchain. Pretty much the only question is whether the notebook is still using a "large"-type INT13 geometry for the hard disk instead of LBA; even nowadays you can't be sure about this.

Filesystems in USB enclosures are always treated as having LBA-type geometries, which is whydisk-to-disk type operations with the new drive temporarily held in a USB enclosure (before swapping it into the machine) often results in failing to boot with notebooks.

That's why for notebook drive replacements it's best to stage the transfer through backup images, like you were planning to do.

You should probably use ext2/3 (they are basically the same, ext3 just adds a metadata recovery logfile like the NTFS one) as your Linux filesystem. I also definitely recommend Ubuntu as your first Linux experience; in particular, it's much more likely to play well on notebook hardware out of the box, and the default installed package selection really is well thought out.

Rad,

Have a look at this reply (the link & quoted text). I have a Lenovo ThinkPad laptop & was thinking of getting a new (higher capacity HDD)-tho' have not yet done so as I instead opted for a new one for desktop(500 GB SATA HD-more cost-effective/GB). It seems you have/will have a similar situation.

Brian wrote on Jul 21^st, 2008 at 10:02pm:

Delete the first partition so it's unallocated space

it will let me delete the first after partitioning the whole drive?
normally, i would delete the first only after deleting all the later partitions.


wrote on Jul 21^st, 2008 at 10:23pm:

the only question is whether the notebook is still using a "large"-type INT13 geometry for the hard disk instead of LBA

the external is fat32. how do i find out about the internal? which is 2.5 years old. i looked in dev mgr, but saw nothing telling there.


Quote:

You should probably use ext2/3

i thot reiserfs was supposed to be the sh!t (v. cool).

http://support.gateway.com/s/Mobile/Gateway/6000Series/5376faq5.shtml

Rad wrote on Jul 22^nd, 2008 at 11:04am:

it will let me delete the first after partitioning the whole drive?

Sure. You could create your partitions by starting from the right hand end of the PM rectangle and omit creating the last partition but I prefer starting from the left end. More intuitive.

Rad wrote on Jul 22^nd, 2008 at 11:04am:

the external is fat32. how do i find out about the internal? which is 2.5 years old. i looked in dev mgr, but saw nothing telling there.

LBA versus LARGE is a BIOS-level setting, and you'll need to enter the BIOS configuration screens to tell. Basically, it's not worth looking at. Staging the transfer through an image always works, and it's safer.


Rad wrote on Jul 22^nd, 2008 at 11:04am:

i thot reiserfs was supposed to be the sh!t (v. cool).

Meh. I've seen better designs over the years (there's *lots* of academic research to draw on in filesystems).

By all means experiment with it yourself, and if it floats your boat, fine. But I'd do that later when you're more confident with UNIX generally (and don't need any tightropes, since nothing else has the toolset support ext2/3 has) and are going to be in a better position to evaluate the finer pros and cons of the different filesystems.

Thanks gents.

I created a Ghost 12 back-up image today on my external USB drive.

One thing .. I noticed my C_drive is *not* my first drive. About a year ago, when I started running low on space, I reformatted the D_drive, which held the emergency restore utility and back-up (~ 7 gigs) that came with the laptop.

Do you forsee that creating any problems?

Since the drive was "invisible" (I forget the file system used), I would expect all pertinent boot info/files to be contained on the C_drive. When trying to access the D_drive before I reformatted it to NTFS, it would give me a warning that said something like, "You don't want to be here. Go away."

I will attach a screenshot of computer management screen. See here:

---

One more thing .. do I need a Linux swap partition? If so, how big?

Rad,

That is certainly a "full" computer. Could you look at your boot.ini to see which partition is referenced as the OS. Although your OS is the second physical partition, it may not be the second primary partition in the partition table and you need to know whether to expect boot.ini problems with the restored image. The plan is to restore the image to the first partition.

wrote on Jul 22^nd, 2008 at 6:48pm:

Staging the transfer through an image always works, and it's safer.

Nigel,

In the Acronis True Image forum a lot of new members report failure when cloning their laptop HDs using an external enclosure to hold the new HD. Many of these laptops are IBM, HP, Compaq brands which have 240 head CHS geometry. The suggestion is to "reverse" clone. Have the old HD in the enclosure and the new HD mounted internally where it's seen in its final geometry. TI can perform a clone from the boot CD. Ghost 12 can't perform a clone from the boot CD so the reverse clone technique isn't available.

Brian wrote on Jul 22^nd, 2008 at 9:22pm:

That is certainly a "full" computer.

I was kinda hopin' nobody would notice.  :-[ Data is oozing out of the drive's seams.

Here'e ye olde rad boot.ini:
Code:

[boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Partition 1. That means it sees the C_drive as the first partition, right? (Or is '0' first??)

Yeah, my plan is to install the system partition to the first partition on the new drive.

You think C drive being on 2nd partition on current drive will be no problem?

Is there a better migration-cloning tool than Ghost?

Rad wrote on Jul 22^nd, 2008 at 11:20pm:

Is there a better migration-cloning tool than Ghost?

I don't think so, but then "Norton Ghost" isn't Ghost at all, it's V2i.

Brian wrote on Jul 22^nd, 2008 at 9:37pm:

Ghost 12 can't perform a clone from the boot CD

Is that an anti-piracy configuration?

wrote on Jul 22^nd, 2008 at 11:26pm:

but then "Norton Ghost" isn't Ghost at all, it's V2i

Yeah, it has been long enuf that I think I finally accepted it as the new "Ghost".

It was not easy to migrate away from a tool that had saved my bacon so many times, and I trusted. If I had a recent image, I always know I could count on it to restore. Reliability is always #1.

PS - Thx for the info on ext3.

Rad wrote on Jul 22^nd, 2008 at 11:20pm:

Partition 1. That means it sees the C_drive as the first partition

Your OS partition is in the first slot of the partition table.

http://terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=159

That's ideal for what you plan to do. Work from left to right in PM. Otherwise your partition table could be back the front. ie The first physical partition may not be the first primary partition in the partition table.


Quote:

You think C drive being on 2nd partition on current drive will be no problem?

Not at all.


Quote:

Is that an anti-piracy configuration?

I'm not sure of their reasons. Acronis True Image, ShadowProtect and others allow cloning from the boot CD.

Brian wrote on Jul 22^nd, 2008 at 11:54pm:

I'm not sure of their reasons. Acronis True Image, ShadowProtect and others allow cloning from the boot CD.

I would prefer to clone from the boot CD.

Rad wrote on Jul 23^rd, 2008 at 1:50am:

I would prefer to clone from the boot CD.

Same here.

I don't clone (Copy Drive in v2i language) except for tests.

What do you use?

In the last year I've been very keen on the TeraByte products and my test clones are done from BING. I can't claim it's more reliable than other software as I've never had a clone or restore failure with any software.

Rad, how large will your new OS partition be? Just interested.

Rad wrote on Jul 22^nd, 2008 at 7:54pm:

One more thing .. do I need a Linux swap partition? If so, how big?

Just like Windows - You don't absolutly need it but it's nice to have.  I follow the same general guidelines as Windows for size.  You can also create a swap file in your main partition (similar to a windows page file) but having it on it's own partition is standard practice.

For file system - RiserFS fell out of favor when Hans Riser was charged with his wife's murder.  (He was convicted a few weeks ago.)  Although his personal life has little do do with RiserFS, the thinking seems to be that development on the file system will suffer.

I have a few friends that swear by XFS.  Their benchmarks and experiences have convinced them it is a superior file system.  I still use and recommend ext3.  It is very well tested and proven, so it has been sort of the default for a long time.  I think Ghost can even image and restore it.

I think you're on the right track with Ubuntu.  It has fantastic hardware support, especially for laptops.  It is good for beginners and has a large community, so you can usually find help.

I switched to ArchLinux a while back.  It is optimized for 686 processors (most distros, including Ubuntu, are still compiled to be compatible with 386) and it seems to me to make a noticeable difference in the snappiness of the system.  I still miss Ubuntu sometimes for its ease of use and huge application repository.  

The latest release is an LTS release, which means Canonical (the company responsible for Ubuntu) has committed to support and security updates for that version for at least 3 years.

Brian wrote on Jul 23^rd, 2008 at 3:42am:

Rad, how large will your new OS partition be? Just interested.

With a 160-gig drive, I figure somewhere around 32 to 40 gigs should be good. There is currently lots junk on the C_drive .. only cuz I didn't have any place else to put it.


MrMagoo wrote on Jul 23^rd, 2008 at 1:53pm:

RiserFS fell out of favor when Hans Riser was charged with his wife's murder. (He was convicted a few weeks ago.)

Holy moly. Linkage?


MrMagoo wrote on Jul 23^rd, 2008 at 1:53pm:

The latest release is an LTS release

What does that acryonym stand for? at Least Three ... something?


MrMagoo wrote on Jul 23^rd, 2008 at 1:53pm:

but having it on it's own partition is standard practice

What is a good size? 128-MB? 256-MB? 512?

Rad wrote on Jul 23^rd, 2008 at 2:48pm:

Holy moly. Linkage?

Just google Hans Riser.  It's all over.  Crazy story.


Rad wrote on Jul 23^rd, 2008 at 2:48pm:

What does that acryonym stand for?

Long Term Support


Rad wrote on Jul 23^rd, 2008 at 2:48pm:

What is a good size?

Honestly, with 2GB of memory, you'll have to push the computer hard to use swap at all, so you don't need much.  If you are just going to surf and read email in Linux, try going without any swap.  I usually use 1GB and have never been close to running out, so you should be safe with 512 or less.  Like I said, you can always add more later as a regular swapfile on the / partition if you need more.  

Rad wrote on Jul 23^rd, 2008 at 2:48pm:

Holy moly. Linkage?

Looks like Wikipedia's coverage is fairly complete (although slightly dry):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Reiser

Rad wrote on Jul 22^nd, 2008 at 11:34pm:

Yeah, it has been long enuf that I think I finally accepted it as the new "Ghost".

Actually, if you want to experiment with current genuine Ghost for doing this migration I'm sure I can arrange that so you can compare. Since you should have enough external USB storage to use both V2i and real Ghost images, you could take images with both and then see how the restore (and partition rearrangement) process works with both.

[ And you can try a "reverse clone" as Brian mentioned, too. ]

Drop me a line at my gmail account if you want to give that a go.

Rad,

What a great idea from Nigel. If you have the time, there are lots of comparison experiments you could try.

Yeah, that would be cool.  8-)

Getting excited already.

Currently backing-up my non-system drives. Talking waaay long.

Sure, I could go thru and delete a bunch of krap, but that would take even longer .. keep - delete, keep - delete.

Here's the US$64K-question » would back-up (non-system drives) go faster if I used Ghost?

Sure seems like the Ghost back-up goes faster. Maybe it's cuz the destination drive only has to write a few big files .. instead of gazillions of small ones.

Brian, what is the deal with DELETEING the partition prior to restore? I've never done that before and it feels weird.

I am thinking of making partition #2 (ext3, to be used for Linux) .. *also* a primary. Anybody see any problems with that config?

I get four (4) primaries, right? And the extended counts as 1, right?

So I should cool, no?

That would put Linux swap the first partition inside the extended. No problemo? Does the linux swap also like to be  primary? Or maybe same as Linux /root?

Can Linux be installed on a non-primary drive?

The RAM upgrade to 2GB went smoothly. Couldn't have been easier. I am now styling with 2 gigs memory.

Rad wrote on Jul 24^th, 2008 at 11:05pm:

Here's the US$64K-question » would back-up (non-system drives) go faster if I used Ghost? Sure seems like the Ghost back-up goes faster. Maybe it's cuz the destination drive only has to write a few big files .. instead of gazillions of small ones.

I don't know for sure but it sounds logical.


Quote:

what is the deal with DELETEING the partition prior to restore? I've never done that before and it feels weird.

It's been a while since I've restored an image to a larger partition and I can't remember if Ghost will allow you to resize the restored partition at restore time. It certainly will if you restore to unallocated space. No big deal. Restore to a partition if that feels more natural and hopefully you can resize at restore time. If Ghost doesn't allow you to resize and you are left with 5 to 10 GB of unallocated space following the partition you can resize later with Partition Magic.

I just hope Ghost allows you to restore partitions that are so full. I think we've had reports of difficulties with full partitions.

Brian wrote on Jul 24^th, 2008 at 11:57pm:

I just hope Ghost allows you to restore partitions that are so full. I think we've had reports of difficulties with full partitions.

I can delete stuff.

What would you consider safe for a 30-gig drive?

The ideal is at least 15% free space. But I don't really know how full the partition can be.

Nigel will know.

I'm not entirely clear whether we're talking genuine Ghost or V2i now, but I don't recall any known problems at all with filesystems with high load factors in genuine Ghost. In principle all it needs is a small amount of room to deal with rearranging things to fit the new partition, but I've honestly not done much testing at high load factors to know if there are any issues left that haven't been cleaned up over recent years.

I was referring to V2i restores but the "evidence" may just be hearsay. I haven't tested "full" partition restores.

Brian wrote on Jul 25^th, 2008 at 1:58am:

The ideal is at least 15% free space.

Okay, got it down to 25 gigs, or 84% by my calcs.

Nigel, I d/l'ed G32.exe, but not sure how to package it. I have no floppy right now, long story. But I *used* to have a USB floppy.

I believe Nero will make a bootable CD for me which I can load G32 onto, but not sure if that will work.

What do you recommend?

Or does someone have a ready-made group of bootable files I can d/l?

I'm not sure about the environment G32 must boot to in order to run, or does it execute from Windows? (I use WXP.)

I ran ghost32.exe from Windows. It appeared to open a DOS/Command window.

I noticed my C drive is listed as drive #2 here. Could that be a problem?

I received msg:


Quote:

A source volume could not be locked as it is in use by another process. Do you want to attempt to force dismount on the volume or use Volume Snapshot? If you choose forced dismount then ALL OPEN FILES ON THIS VOLUME WOULD BE INVALID

That didn't sound good so I selected Volume Snapshot. The image said it was "Successful".

I burned ghost32.exe to a CD.

Figure I could boot up with my Partition Magic CD, and swap out with ghost32.exe CD and run Ghost from there?? No?

I am concerned about the MBR being cloned over from the source image .. with both ghost32.exe and Ghost 12 (v2i).

What say ye regarding all the files my system needs to boot after restoring the image?

Once I have an O/S, I can handle it from there.

It worked!

I'm back with new 160-GB Western Digital drive. Here's what I did:

C: 40 GB Primary Active NTFS (old drive was 30 GB)
_: 20 GB Primary Linux Ext3 (no swap created, was worried about using too many primary partitions)
D: 25 GB Logical Extended NTFS (old drive was 7 GB)
F: 65 GB Logical Extended NTFS (old drive was 20 GB)

My Partition Magic boot CD gave me problems:


Quote:

Starting Caldera DR-DOS Error 91 Disk Manager has been detected on drive 1, but Disk Manager is not running. If you are booting from a floppy, remove the floppy disk and reboot. Press and hold SPACE BAR as your computer restarts, when prompted insert your boot floppy.

Hitting Okay takes me to A:\>

If I booted with the new hard disk drive in system with NO boot CD, I got following message:


Quote:

Yukon PXE v3.06 (2004 1109) Pre-boot eXecution Environment (PXE) v2.1 PXE-E61: Media Test failure, check cable No OS Found Insert OS setup disc, then press any key

So I just partitioned with trusty 'ol FDISK, since I can use that in my sleep.

At first, my Ghost 12 Recovery CD wouldn't boot and I started sweating bullets:


Quote:

Press any key to boot from CD or DVD NTLDR is missing Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

But after ctrl-Alt-Del, Ghost 12 loaded normally.

Then, after the reboot, and I saw the Windows XP screen load, I was stoked! I was actually on the phone to my cell phone company, upping my monthly minutes, when it booted. (Been talking a lot lately.)

Definitely considerably faster. No doubt about it. The old drive was a Hitachi Travelstar, if anybody cares. I think Hitachi bought IBM's disk drive deivison a few years back.

After I finished booting into Windows I received message:


Quote:

Windows has finished installing new devices. The software that supports your device requires you restart your computer. You must restart before the new settings will take effect. Do you want to restart now?

(I did.)

About Ext3, I received following msg:


Quote:

Officially introduced with Red Hat Linux v7.2, Ext3 is forward- and backward-compatible with Ext2. It has multiple journaling modes, as well as broad, cross-platform compatibility in both 32- and 64-bit architectures.

But I cannot see this drive from Windows.

Is there a way to be able to "ALT-TAB" (so to speak) back and forth between Windows and Linux? (with having to reboot)\\

Is that what virtualization lets you do? Or am I dreaming?

Had to yank 4 screws, 2 on each side, to remove old drive from mounting bracket. Almost looks like drive CLIPS in, but doesn't. Would break bracket if I tried to UNCLIP it. Word of caution to those attempting same.

Surprising how small/light these drives are. The 160-gigger is no heavier than the 60-gigger it replaced.

One last thing: Ghost 12 automatically expanded my image taken from a 30-gig drive .. to fill the FULL SIZE of the 40-gig partition onto which it was restored.

Also, I ticked off the following during restore:

* Verify recovery point before restore
* check for file system errors after recovery
* Set drive active (for booting O/S)
* Restore original disk signature
* Restore MBR

Basically, that means I checked EVERYTHING that could be checked.

One more thing .. when Ghost 12 first launched .. it showed the two recovery points (images) I had created .. (on external USB drive) .. but BOTH these images were listed as "Invalid" .. under both "Drive:" and "Target Drive:"

when i selected either of these images by putting a check-mark in the box beside it, a red X would appear right next to the check-mark.

(More sweating bullets.)

Had to click the "Add" button and manually navigate to where the images (Recovery points) were stored .. to be able to use them. This way worked fine.

when i selected this image this way, by putting check-mark in box, a green circle appeared beside.

Rad wrote on Jul 25^th, 2008 at 5:19pm:

Is that what virtualization lets you do? Or am I dreaming?

That's precisely what virtualization does. Run other "guest" OS's in a normal window on whatever host OS you use. Pretty much the only combination that is hard to do is MacOSX as a guest since it wants to run only on Apple hardware.

The only drawback is that - for effectively full virtualization a la VMWare - they all still need to fit into your actual physical memory, and because the virtual hardware can't dynamically tell the guest OS about memory coming and going, you need to statically decide how much memory to allocate to the virtual hardware each "guest" OS runs in.

[ This is why there are several completely different virtualization systems in Solaris; there are higher-level software virtualizers that work on the UNIX user process level, *and* ones that work at a lower level in the OS, *and* full OS hardware virtualization. The higher-level virtualizers can do more fancy things, and don't need static resource partitioning like the hardware ones do. ]

So, with ~2Gb (or more) of memory you can run quite a few machines, and they can make good use of multiple cores. It's fun seeing how many levels you can stack up, too, and you can *really* get a good hall of mirrors going if you have more machines and remote desktop/VNC.


Rad wrote on Jul 25^th, 2008 at 2:44pm:

Figure I could boot up with my Partition Magic CD, and swap out with ghost32.exe CD and run Ghost from there?? No?

It's easiest to run it from a USB device (memory stick or hard drive) with the Windows PE environments from Norton Ghost 12 or Partition Magic.

As I said via e-mail, since I didn't have time to upload the full GSS2.5 install set, I could have prepared and uploaded you a WinPE2 boot CD with it (the Boot Wizard makes that, and creating bootable USB memory sticks, pretty easy) but I figured you could use those other environments in the meantime. If you want to run more experiments I can still do that, it's just going to be slow given the upload cap on my residential DSL until I get back to work on Monday.

At least, that's assuming that the power stays on. http://www.stuff.co.nz/4631448a11.html

Here's an example from my notebook (scaled down since it runs 1920x1200 native); Solaris running NetBeans, Ubuntu running kDevelop, and I opened up FreeDOS just for grins (I could have run XP as well but I tend to give the UNIX VMs lots of RAM since development toolchains are pretty memory-hungry)

---

That is pretty cool. Are those installs running nested in another OS, such as Windows? Or are they .. I forget the word, but it means running directly off the hardware, and not floating in another OS .. maybe type 1 or type 2 hypervisor.


wrote on Jul 25^th, 2008 at 6:38pm:

scaled down since it runs 1920x1200 native

u suk.  :)

Files are copying back onto new hard drive now .. going much faster than the other way (to USB hard drive) .. but still taking a while.

Next time I back-up a whole drive to external usb drive, i am going to use Ghost, cuz it seems to go much faster than regular ol' Windows file copy ala explorer. little files take forever. big files go reasonably fast. I mean non-sysem drives.

I have 2G RAM now. How much does Linux need? I want WXP + Ubuntu. I already partitioned off 20 gigs Ext3 for Linux. Will I use that?

Rad wrote on Jul 25^th, 2008 at 10:09pm:

Are those installs running nested in another OS, such as Windows? Or are they .. I forget the word, but it means running directly off the hardware, and not floating in another OS .. maybe type 1 or type 2 hypervisor

Really, there isn't a clear boundary between any of these things, it's a spectrum. In this case they are running nested, but in a hypervisor (VMWare does most of its heavy lifting in kernel mode, not user mode).

If you believe in these classifications, VMWare is a type 2 hypervisor, whereas the old kind from the IBM 360 (VM/CMS) or the VAX VMM which were around 30-ish years ago is a type 1. The x86 architecture can't support the type 1 kind properly anyway; although originally designed for VM monitors in the multiple ring structure in the segmented days, that all fall apart when the 32-bit architecture and paging system was retrofitted on without enough thought.

What VMWare-type hypervisors do, though, is allow various kinds of hybrid operation; VMWare in a host OS does a mixture of hardware arbitration and emulation. What VMWare does to get speed from the emulation is do some nifty stuff - instead of typical privilege traps to emulation paths (which are excruciatingly slow on a lousy architecture like the x86), privilege traps cause the monitor to patch the faulting instructions with non-faulting code sequences so that the system running under VMware runs at pretty high speed without much emulation overhead.

And even in the old days the classic hypervisors, which started out mostly trying to arbitrate access to the underlying physical hardware, did end up doing outright emulation of some virtual devices. So, don't read too much into the categorization.

And these systems can run in different ways. VMWare ESX is pretty thin, so it's doing more hardware arbitration and less emulation, since there isn't really a hosting OS as such, making it in many respects it's closer to a classic type 1 hypervisor. VMWare under Windows or Linux or MacOS is doing a lot more hardware emulation, and that's more type 2.


Rad wrote on Jul 25^th, 2008 at 10:09pm:

How much does Linux need?

Depends what you need, but probably very little. Since you'll probably be exploring web-type development, which isn't exactly resource-intensive, 512Mb would be more than plenty. Ubuntu has a nice performance monitor applet modeled on the Windows task manager, so you can learn what different activities cause in terms of memory load pretty easily.

Rad wrote on Jul 25^th, 2008 at 10:09pm:

I already partitioned off 20 gigs Ext3 for Linux. Will I use that?

If you want, you can; most virtual machine managers can be pointed at physical partitions to reduce emulation overhead, although frankly I never ever bother - it's much more convenient to be able to simply copy around entire virtual machines from place to place by hosting the virtual disks in files (and when using files to back the emulated disks you get to use the snapshotting abilities of the virtual machine managers to bookmark and resume to complete machine states anytime you like).

Oh, and that Windows desktop you can see in the background is the host OS, which in this case is Windows (since I spend most of my time there, and Visual Studio really is a vastly nicer working environment than the others for C++ development).

Rad,

I think we are all pleased that the trauma has past. Sweating bullets.

I'm interested in the PM error...


Quote:

Starting Caldera DR-DOS Error 91 Disk Manager has been detected on drive 1, but Disk Manager is not running. If you are booting from a floppy, remove the floppy disk and reboot. Press and hold SPACE BAR as your computer restarts, when prompted insert your boot floppy.

At what stage did this happen?

Quote:

At what stage did this happen?

This errors when you try to launch PM 805 from install CD, which is bootable.

I first tried booting with the old hdd still in (testing my tools before needed), and figured it weird that it errored .. cuz maybe it didn't like seeing the installed copy.

But then when it errored upon booting up after I installed the NEW disk, uh, I couldn't figure that out .. cuz the new disk was empty .. except for the message I already posted.

Today I went back and added two more partitions, using PM from Windows.

1. Linux swap (1-GB)
2. FAT32 (1-GB)

both nested inside extended partition, at very end of drive, after shrinking the last (65-gig) partition 2-GB from its end.

One of the Ubuntu install guides I read suggested creating the FAT32 partition as a place where you can store downloads b4 scaning for viruses .. b4 importing these files into Windows/NTFS. I like that idea, and I did it in a way that I didn't have to create/use any more primary partitions.

I am thinking of busting the Linux proper ext3 into two .. so I can ALSO install a copy of CentOS 5, which the Rad server uses. Learning the server mojo is a big part of why I want Linux.

The big question tho > is 10 gigs too small for a Linux install?

I could do something like 12/8 .. if CentOS wouldn't need as much space.

That would mean using all four primary partitions. Anybody forsee a problem with that?

This question should probably be a new thread:

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1217103795/2#2