My computer is broken :(

[GAHD]

well, it's hard to redo partitions on the fly, you'll probably needto reformat to do it at all.

[GAHD]

oh and @ pgrm: could the probelm be with your IDE controller? If all your drivesare giving errors and they're all hooked ontothe same controller...

[C1ay]

well, it's hard to redo partitions on the fly, you'll probably needto reformat to do it at all.

I've never had any problems with FIPS. A defrag and FIPS makes it pretty painless to partition off the free space on a disk.

[C1ay]

oh and @ pgrm: could the probelm be with your IDE controller? If all your drivesare giving errors and they're all hooked ontothe same controller...

I was wondering the same except that he indicated he'd had troubles with both CD devices and his hard drive and he could only have two of these per IDE channel. It could be an IDE controller problem though...

[GAHD]

FIPS! And here i thought partition magic wasthe only program who could do that!

[alexander]

cfdisk does a good job, i have screwed up many windows installs with partition magic, and i have no idea, but apparently the new suse and ubuntu installers have partitioning utilities that allow you to resize an ntfs partiton and create new logical partitions using the free space. (ps linux runs at least 3 partitions, boot; where you keep the kernels, swap; that is used much like ram, but slower, and your main partition that has your os, and so forth. However for security and speed reasons you can partition off other folders, i generaly run 6-8 partitions depending on what it is i am setting up.

 

Linux does not take quite the space that a windows system does, however you still want to have room for software and your own files and stuff (like i have 2.5 gigs of music, and over 3000 programs, and those take up a bit of space, see where i'm going with this) also i recommend Ubuntu over Knoppix, because you have a graphical package manager (basically you launch it and have a huge searchable list of software, select what you want, click apply and it downloads and installs it for ya, updates go through the same way, it updates not only your system, but all the software you have installed as well)

 

P.S. windows wont let you see linux data, cuz they only support fat and ntfs partitions, linux will alow you to see all the windows data, including files and folders that you can not see with windows... (usualy in a read only mode for new proprietary partitions, if you wanna write to an ntfs partition for example, i strongly urge you to first defrag it before you try to actually write to it (trust me there is a good reason for this)

[GAHD]

You can install linux onto fat32 and then windows can see it, if not run the programs. You can also mount your swap to a file instead of to a partition.

 

Atlest with gentoo you can.

[alexander]

lol, why would you want to install linux on such a worthless file system? It fragments, it's not journaled, and recovering any fs errors is a total pain in the behind.... WHY???? and making a swap file, although sounds cool, isnt quite as efficient as designating a separate partition for it, not like it is that hard to make that partition....

[nemo]

Just a thought... I had a memory stick start to go bad a while back, and chased inconsistent errors all over my filesystem. The difference in our situations: my machine was already dual-booted - watching the same machine flip out in different operating systems narrowed the problem to hardware pretty quickly.

[alexander]

its not too hard now days with live cds, with hardware testing tools, stuff like testing memory is now a task that is not necessarily taken by a specialized testing equipment...