Recovery Partition

[Kocmotex]

Recently upgraded old Win98 IBM Aptiva, 300 MHz, to a Toshiba Satellite M45, XP Pro, and an hp Pavillion a1450n, Athon 64 X2 Dual Core with XP Pro.

Two great machines, but Win XP Pro is on one partition on C: drive and both have a Primary Partition dedicated to Recovery Purposes.

I can easily allocate the other two available primary partitions to a Boot Partition and an Extended Partition with various and assundry Logical Partitions for Linux Systems and FAT 32 User Data Files.

However, Win XP has removed some features that I had used in Win 2000 Pro and I need a Primary Partition for Win 2000 Pro.

I have two copies of Partition Magic 8.0, now owned by Norton, whose only support are echo chambers based upon my experience.

Does anyone have a suggestion?

 

[PC eye]

First thing when running two versions of Windows on one drive is to install the older version first on the first primary partition. When you later install the newer version the master boot record for the oldest is modified for dual booting both. Windows mandates the need for the first partition when dual OSing with Linux. When dual OSing you first have to plan out a drive.

Running Linux and Windows? Looks like you'll a tool for the "two different" types of partitions involved. While most newer distros are now starting to include the Gnome Partition Editor you will probably to burn yourself a separate copy of GParted live for cd on a cd-r. You can choose which version from 0.1 upto 0.3.2.0 at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115843&package_id=173828 It will cost you a total of...? a cd-r!

Of course that is downloaded in an iso disk image where you will need something to burn iso images to disk. This is a good day for you since BurnOn has a free version found at http://www.burnworld.com/burnoncddvd/

 

[Kocmotex]

Dear PC Eye:

I want to thank you very much for your help. I was totally unaware of the sequential boot requirement for two Microsoft OSs. Also, albeit that I have not had an opportunity to get back to reconfiguring the laptop, I have downloaded the Gnome Partition Editor and the Burn World software. Again, thank you very very much.

Kocmotex

 

[PC eye]

I also had some fun lately with Vista. I went to install it as a second OS on the second ide drive here to follow the XP Pro installation. It refused to go on. Apparently Vista is geared to install to the first primary on the drive it's installed onto. The former storage partition was later simply copied to a new sata drive added where XP Pro now will have to be tried out. GParted quickly deleted the second partition and resized the primary for Vista. XP is a lot closer to 2000 for dual OSing there. XP will readily go on a second parition with 2000 on the first. You can use GParted to first reduce the 2000 primary down far enough for a good sized XP primary.

Keep track of your drive space however for each. you will need to keep over 2gb free at all times for XP for the creation of page files used for virtual memory. Otherwise you will errors appear where Windows will fail to load fully. I run into that occasionally with video captures where now the new drive will see those stored.