Re: [gentoo-user] Windows on a second drive?

[Neil Bothwick <neil@digimed.co.uk>]

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On Mon, 5 Sep 2005 19:33:01 -0700, Mark Knecht wrote:

> Even though it says [MBR] above it won't proceed without creating at
> least one partition on drive 0. It appears I cannot install Windows XP
> on a second drive without writing 30MB to the boot drive?

Don't you just hate the arrogance of a system that tells you which of
your drives should be used to store your files! :(

> Is it possible to safely shrink an ext3 partition on the current drive
> 0 to make way for this?

You can resize an unmounted partition by running resize2fs to shrink the
filesystem, then delete the partition in cfdisk and recreate it slightly
larger than the new filesystem size and then running resize2fs again. Or
you could just boot from a Knoppix CD and run qtparted.

> The only other thought that comes to mind at this point, assuming I
> haven't missed something obvious, is to rearrange the drives in the
> box and make drive 1 into drive 0. If I then installed grub on the
> Windows drive and fixed up fstab and the contents of grub.conf to
> recognize Gentoo on drive 1, would it work?

This certainly seems the best solution. It saves Windows getting arsey
about drives or having to try to fool it with GRUB map commands. I'd
disconnect the Gentoo drive and install Windows, then replace the Gentoo
drive as slave, boot from a live CD, edit fstab and run grub. windows
should then remain blissfully unaware of your Gentoo installation, which
means it won't try to "fix" it for you at some random later date.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Are you using Windows or is that just an XT?

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