[gentoo-user] amd64 installation questions

[gentoo-user] amd64 installation questions

[James]

Hello,

I've been handed a new amd64 portable (HP-8000), which must keep
XP on it. To perform an installation, I usually use Partition
Magic, which has worked very well to down-size the windoze partition.
This system (suposedly) has another hidden partition that XP uses to
restore the OS, if the XP installation ever get's corrupted. NO XP 
installation CD was provided.   


I was wondering if any of the opensource repartitioning tools
have matured to the point I could used one of them in lieu
of Partition Magic?

In order to keep the XP installation:
Does it matter if I setup Gentoo on the portable first, before going thru
all of those windoze installation/initialization menus? 


Any wiki examples (gotchas) on xorg.conf or make.conf (as this is my first
amd64 installation) are welcome.


James




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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: amd64 installation: which file system?

[Richard Fish]

On 7/18/06, James <wireless@tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
> My question now is which file system would be best to use? I have used
> reiserfs with great success, but reiser4 or xfs look appealing.

I would stay far away from reiser4.  From what I can tell, reiser4 may
never make it into the mainline kernel.  Xfs and ext3 are both very
good choices.  Personally I have a /very slight/ preference for xfs,
because of xfs_fsr and the tuning options available in /proc.

> Recommendations  for a file system that is mostly going to be challenged
> by streaming video (mpeg, h.264 dirac, ogg theora....) is of keen
> interest. Any benchmarks available?

Partitioning is probably the most important thing you could do for the
performance of this system.    Make a separate filesystem for the
video work, so it doesn't have to compete for block/extent allocations
with the rest of your system.

-Richard
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[gentoo-user] Re: amd64 installation: which file system?

[James]

Richard Fish <bigfish <at> asmallpond.org> writes:


> > My question now is which file system would be best to use? I have used
> > reiserfs with great success, but reiser4 or xfs look appealing.

> I would stay far away from reiser4.  From what I can tell, reiser4 may
> never make it into the mainline kernel.  Xfs and ext3 are both very
> good choices.  Personally I have a /very slight/ preference for xfs,
> because of xfs_fsr and the tuning options available in /proc.

I understand the comments about reiser4, although folks claim the performance
is wonderful. But do you think that xfs will outperform reiserfs (3 series?).


> > Recommendations  for a file system that is mostly going to be challenged
> > by streaming video (mpeg, h.264 dirac, ogg theora....) is of keen
> > interest. Any benchmarks available?

> Partitioning is probably the most important thing you could do for the
> performance of this system.    Make a separate filesystem for the
> video work, so it doesn't have to compete for block/extent allocations
> with the rest of your system.

Agreeded. 

 I have a problem I thought I had solved. I have tried
Partition Magic 7.0, repartitioning on the experimental livecd for 
amd64 and now the  livecd from Gparted.  All allow resizing of the
85 Gig ntfs partition, but, when I go to commit(run). All three 
fail. No matter what I do, I cannot reduce the 85Gig down to 30gig.

This URL suggest defragging the windows (NTFS partition) to be able
to condense the XP OS:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Install_Linux_after_Windows

Resizing this partition on an HP8000 portable should not be so
difficult. What am I missing? Several site allude to Microsoft
trying to make it difficult for Linux users.....

Ideas?




James




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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: amd64 installation: which file system?

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Tue, 18 Jul 2006 22:12:37 +0000 (UTC), James wrote:

> > I would stay far away from reiser4.  From what I can tell, reiser4 may
> > never make it into the mainline kernel.  Xfs and ext3 are both very
> > good choices.  Personally I have a /very slight/ preference for xfs,
> > because of xfs_fsr and the tuning options available in /proc.
> 
> I understand the comments about reiser4, although folks claim the
> performance is wonderful. But do you think that xfs will outperform
> reiserfs (3 series?).

It certainly does when working with large files. However, I've switched
some of my filesystems back to reiser because of the lack of any way of
safely shrinking XFS filesystems (although enlarging them is easier than
with reiser).


-- 
Neil Bothwick

New Intel opcode #007 PUKE: Put unmeaningful keywords everywhere

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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: amd64 installation: which file system?

[Richard Fish]

On 7/18/06, James <wireless@tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
> I understand the comments about reiser4, although folks claim the performance
> is wonderful. But do you think that xfs will outperform reiserfs (3 series?).

For large files, I think xfs has a slight edge over reiserfs.
_Nothing_ beats reiserfs (except maybe reiser4) at handling lots of
small files though.  So I think reiserfs is great for /var and
/usr/portage, /usr/src, maybe even /.

>  I have a problem I thought I had solved. I have tried
> Partition Magic 7.0, repartitioning on the experimental livecd for
> amd64 and now the  livecd from Gparted.  All allow resizing of the
> 85 Gig ntfs partition, but, when I go to commit(run). All three
> fail. No matter what I do, I cannot reduce the 85Gig down to 30gig.

If you look at the filesystem in a tool that will show you what files
occupy which extents (like O&ODefrag), you can take a look at what
(locked) files exist near the end of the filesystem.  Things like
c:\hiberfil.sys and c:\$log are nearly impossible to move, so they
could be the source of the problem.

If this is the case, you might have no choice but to reformat and
reinstall XP if you want a smaller NTFS volume.

-Richard
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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: amd64 installation: which file system?

[Dale]

Howdy,

I did a install of Mandriva recently and found out this bit of info.  If
you have frequent power failures and no UPS, do NOT use XFS.  It was a
nightmare to get back up because of things not getting started again and
I just reinstalled Mandriva with reiserfs.  It worked very well with
Reiserfs but XFS was not something I want to try on that machine again
for sure.

If I had a UPS, it would have been fine.  Maybe someone can explain this
one to me a bit better.

Dale

:-)  :-)  :-)
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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: amd64 installation: which file system?

[Richard Fish]

On 7/18/06, Donnie Berkholz <dberkholz@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Yes, it's well known that XFS sucks with unexpected power loss, Reiser
> and JFS less so. ext3 remains the most reliable filesystem.

Yeah, I can't deny that.

Fortunately for my laptop, "unexpected power loss" is never an issue.
Lockups still are though, so I make sure to build with SysRq support.
I would guess that in 99% of cases where a hard reset is necessary,
Alt-SysRq-s (emergency sync) and Alt-SysRq-u (remount read-only) still
work.  I just have to remember to wait until the disk light goes out
before Alt-SysRq-b (reboot).  I forgot once, and my running VMWare
session lost its config file and corrupted its disk image!

It also helps to fiddle with the vm and xfs sysctl settings so that
XFS doesn't sit there with unsync'd data that is 10-20 minutes old!

-Richard
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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: amd64 installation: which file system?

[Mick]

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On Wednesday 19 July 2006 01:57, Richard Fish wrote:

> Fortunately for my laptop, "unexpected power loss" is never an issue.
> Lockups still are though, so I make sure to build with SysRq support.

Other than xorg.conf where else do you need to specify this?  If my xorg locks 
up I lose the keyboard/mouse and have to pull the plug no matter what.  :-(
-- 
Regards,
Mick

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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: amd64 installation: which file system?

[Richard Fish]

On 7/19/06, Mick <michaelkintzios@gmail.com> wrote:
> Other than xorg.conf where else do you need to specify this?  If my xorg locks
> up I lose the keyboard/mouse and have to pull the plug no matter what.  :-(

Not in xorg.conf at all.  It is a kernel option CONFIG_MAGIC_SYSRQ,
enabled by "Magic SysRq key" under Kernel Hacking.

The nice thing is that it usually works even if X is completely hosed,
to the point where even the CapsLock key & light doesn't work.

The hard part is to remember what the shortcuts are at the point you need them!

-Richard
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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: amd64 installation: which file system?

[Mick]

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On Wednesday 19 July 2006 09:23, Richard Fish wrote:
> On 7/19/06, Mick <michaelkintzios@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Other than xorg.conf where else do you need to specify this?  If my xorg
> > locks up I lose the keyboard/mouse and have to pull the plug no matter
> > what.  :-(
>
> Not in xorg.conf at all.  It is a kernel option CONFIG_MAGIC_SYSRQ,
> enabled by "Magic SysRq key" under Kernel Hacking.

Doh! That's what I was doing wrong.  :-P

> The hard part is to remember what the shortcuts are at the point you need
> them!

I've hit those buttons so many times I know the sequence by heart. LOL

Thanks!
-- 
Regards,
Mick

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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: amd64 installation: which file system?

[Cliff Wells]

On Tue, 2006-07-18 at 17:33 -0700, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> Dale wrote:
> > Howdy,
> > 
> > I did a install of Mandriva recently and found out this bit of info.  If
> > you have frequent power failures and no UPS, do NOT use XFS.  It was a
> > nightmare to get back up because of things not getting started again and
> > I just reinstalled Mandriva with reiserfs.  It worked very well with
> > Reiserfs but XFS was not something I want to try on that machine again
> > for sure.
> 
> Yes, it's well known that XFS sucks with unexpected power loss, Reiser
> and JFS less so. ext3 remains the most reliable filesystem.

I'd be curious who this is well-know to.  The only XFS filesystem I've
ever lost (having used XFS exclusively since SGI started offering it on
RH 7.?) was due to bad RAM.  There *have* been a couple of issues that
I'm aware of, but I'd hardly call it "sucking".  

Regards,
Cliff
 
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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: amd64 installation: which file system?

[Donnie Berkholz]

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Cliff Wells wrote:
> I'd be curious who this is well-know to.  The only XFS filesystem I've
> ever lost (having used XFS exclusively since SGI started offering it on
> RH 7.?) was due to bad RAM.  There *have* been a couple of issues that
> I'm aware of, but I'd hardly call it "sucking".  

I'm too lazy to search all over the net for xfs "power outage" or "power
loss", here's a couple of examples:

http://lwn.net/Articles/181355/
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=1&chap=4#doc_chap4

Thanks,
Donnie



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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: amd64 installation: which file system?

[Alan E. Davis]

PREFACE: I don't know what I'm talking about, but....

Seriously, I can't even tread water with these guys, but I installed
GNU/Linux on a gateway laptop with a recover partition.  I believe I
did a defrag, but it's been a long time, but for sure, I was left with
the impression at one point that there were some files in the NTFS,
nearer to the end of the partition than I'd have liked.

I tried qtparted/gparted from several different live cds, knoppix and
ubuntu, I believe.  I think my first install was Ubuntu, but I had to
use knoppix to repartition.  This has been an issue a couple of times.
 Various *parteds gave different results.  I was able to shrink the
NTFS partition far more than I thought would be possible, and I bit
the bullet and just did it, thinking it would fail, but who cares, I'm
only keeping NTFS/XP because the school district gave me the machine,
and they might require me to run a gradebook.

Again, I've shrunk the NTFS a couple more times, since I don't use it
much, and no problems in any of the FEW times I've run Windoze.

If you are thinking of hosing your partitions, I'd suggest trying
other, more up to date, maybe, LiveCDs, and one of them might work.
Just don't quote me on this.

Alan Davis



On 7/19/06, Donnie Berkholz <dberkholz@gentoo.org> wrote:
> Cliff Wells wrote:
> > I'd be curious who this is well-know to.  The only XFS filesystem I've
> > ever lost (having used XFS exclusively since SGI started offering it on
> > RH 7.?) was due to bad RAM.  There *have* been a couple of issues that
> > I'm aware of, but I'd hardly call it "sucking".
>
> I'm too lazy to search all over the net for xfs "power outage" or "power
> loss", here's a couple of examples:
>
> http://lwn.net/Articles/181355/
> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=1&chap=4#doc_chap4
>
> Thanks,
> Donnie
>
>
>
>
>


-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan  lngndvs@gmail.com     1-670-256-2043

I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I
must share it with other people who like it.
                                          --------Richard Stallman
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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: amd64 installation: which file system?

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Tue, 18 Jul 2006 18:32:17 -0700, Donnie Berkholz wrote:

> I'm too lazy to search all over the net for xfs "power outage" or "power
> loss", here's a couple of examples:
> 
> http://lwn.net/Articles/181355/
> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=1&chap=4#doc_chap4

It seems the latest releases are more forgiving, less prone to
overwriting open files with random data when power fails. but it is still
risky to run on a system without some form of battery.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Save energy: Drive a smaller shell.

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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: amd64 installation: which file system?

[Cliff Wells]

On Tue, 2006-07-18 at 18:32 -0700, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> Cliff Wells wrote:
> > I'd be curious who this is well-know to.  The only XFS filesystem I've
> > ever lost (having used XFS exclusively since SGI started offering it on
> > RH 7.?) was due to bad RAM.  There *have* been a couple of issues that
> > I'm aware of, but I'd hardly call it "sucking".  
> 
> I'm too lazy to search all over the net for xfs "power outage" or "power
> loss", here's a couple of examples:
> 
> http://lwn.net/Articles/181355/
> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=1&chap=4#doc_chap4

Sorry, not convinced.  The first is some second-hand quote of Ted T'so
who just *happens* to have a bone to pick with other filesystems.  All
the gentoo article states is some info from the XFS docs about XFS'
"aggressive" caching and potential *data* loss (not FS corruption).
While it's not well-known that XFS sucks in a power outage, it is
well-known that it writes journal before data.  This is a design choice
that helps ensure that while you may lose data in a power outage, you
won't lose your filesystem.  I know no one here seriously thinks that
they won't lose data in a power outage no matter what FS they use so I'm
still unsure how that makes XFS suck.

Bottom line is after 5 years of almost nothing but XFS on many, many
computers (most of them not on UPS), I've had nothing but good fortune
with XFS.  OTOH, I've got a corrupted EXT3 system sitting here I'm
trying to repair for a customer after someone turned it off, and my one
attempt with JFS (when I got my first 64-bit PC) led to almost immediate
disaster.

Bottom line is that if you lose power you risk losing data.  My
experience has been that not only does XFS not fair worse than the other
filesystems, it appears to fair better.

Regards,
Cliff

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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: amd64 installation: which file system?

[Cliff Wells]

As a more useful bit of info than anecdotes and scaremongering, here's a
decent article that covers XFS in fair detail and compares a few of its
major differences from the other journaled filesystems:

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-fs9.html

The section on "Journaling" is especially enlightening as it both shows
why people fear data loss on XFS and also why it tends not to happen so
much in real-life usage.

Regards,
Cliff


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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: amd64 installation: which file system?

[Richard Fish]

On 7/20/06, Cliff Wells <cliff@develix.com> wrote:
> As a more useful bit of info than anecdotes and scaremongering, here's a
> decent article that covers XFS in fair detail and compares a few of its
> major differences from the other journaled filesystems:
>
> http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-fs9.html

Posting links to articles written by Gentoo's founder is cheating! :-)

But in fact, Daniel didn't really address the real-world reliability
of the filesystems.  He addressed it theoretically, and only in
relation to reiserfs, not ext3.  But in fact I disagree with one
assertion that Daniel makes:

"but writing metadata more frequently does encourage data to be
written more frequently as well"

In it's default configuration, XFS avoids writing data out to disk
until it absolutely has to, or a *significant* amount of time has
elapsed.  Only by tweaking /proc settings have I gotten it to flush
out data in a reasonable amount of time.

Are you seriously telling me that in all the years you have run XFS
filesystems, you have never seen /var/log/messages get padded with
nuls?  That is the kind of "corruption" that XFS is well known for.
(BTW, I _know_ this is a security feature.  But the fact is that ext3
users pretty much _never_ see this kind of data, um, "security").  It
may be great at maintaining it's own consistency, but it seems
particularly predatory to the files contained within it.  I've already
mentioned a recent corruption I had with XFS on one of my systems...

Besides, every time this discussion has come up here, the majority of
particpants have agreed that ext3 is the least likely to corrupt data.

Don't get me wrong.  I like XFS, and I am running it on my laptop and
desktop systems.  However I have tweaked the settings so that it
behaves like I want, and am very cautious about just hitting the
reset/power button when I get a lockup.  I have learned that the hard
way.

And my "bottom line" is: if someone came here and asked "what is the
most reliable filesystem", my answer would be ext3.  Hands down.

-Richard
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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: amd64 installation: which file system?

[Richard Fish]

On 7/20/06, Cliff Wells <cliff@develix.com> wrote:
> Well, the other "well-known" bit of info is that ext3 gets much of its
> "reliability" from syncing every 5 seconds.  If you want to use XFS and
> get that sort of data reliability, here's a bash script to add to
> rc.local:
>
> ( while true; do sync; sleep 5; done )&

Well, you laugh, but my /etc/sysctl.conf contains:

vm.laptop_mode = 0
fs.xfs.xfssyncd_centisecs = 500

> You can also mount XFS in sync mode if you are paranoid, but be warned
> that it keeps your disks *very* busy.

Yeah.  I would rather use ext3 with data=journal!

> So I guess the real question is this: what qualifies as "FS
> reliability".

Right.  "Sucks" is imprecise in most circles.

But consider this...the entire value of a filesystem is the files it
contains.  A filesystem that fixes itself by doing the equivalent of
"mkfs" on reboot from a crash will be both completely consistent, and
completely useless.  By anyone's definition, it would "suck".

> cross-linked files and bad inode counts).  Also, having to fsck a large
> disk array is going to be quite painful.

Yes, ext3 maintainers are well aware of this.  Have you seen:

http://infohost.nmt.edu/~val/fs_workshop/

And the lwn article:
http://lwn.net/Articles/189547/

-Richard
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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: amd64 installation: which file system?

[Dale]

Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> Dale wrote:
>   
>> Howdy,
>>
>> I did a install of Mandriva recently and found out this bit of info.  If
>> you have frequent power failures and no UPS, do NOT use XFS.  It was a
>> nightmare to get back up because of things not getting started again and
>> I just reinstalled Mandriva with reiserfs.  It worked very well with
>> Reiserfs but XFS was not something I want to try on that machine again
>> for sure.
>>     
>
> Yes, it's well known that XFS sucks with unexpected power loss, Reiser
> and JFS less so. ext3 remains the most reliable filesystem.
>
> Thanks,
> Donnie
>
>   
It was fast though.  It seemed to do well on that but no power failures
is a must to be sure.  At least now I know it was not just picking on
me.  Things usually do that.

Dale

:-)  :-) 
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[gentoo-user] Re: amd64 installation: which file system?

[James]

Richard Fish <bigfish <at> asmallpond.org> writes:


> For large files, I think xfs has a slight edge over reiserfs.

I've had several machine on 100% reiserfs and been very happy,
with the performance, and never had to recover, even when
an unexpected power loss occured.  It was time I looked into
a new FS but, I do not see much performance gain over reiserfs,
except for reiser4, which is not recommend. Reiserfs has
been very, stable for the gentoo systems I manage.

> >  I have a problem I thought I had solved. I have tried
> > Partition Magic 7.0, repartitioning on the experimental livecd for
> > amd64 and now the  livecd from Gparted.  All allow resizing of the
> > 85 Gig ntfs partition, but, when I go to commit(run). All three
> > fail. No matter what I do, I cannot reduce the 85Gig down to 30gig.

> If you look at the filesystem in a tool that will show you what files
> occupy which extents (like O&ODefrag), you can take a look at what
> (locked) files exist near the end of the filesystem.  Things like
> c:\hiberfil.sys and c:\$log are nearly impossible to move, so they
> could be the source of the problem.

> If this is the case, you might have no choice but to reformat and
> reinstall XP if you want a smaller NTFS volume.


Well I did not get a XP-pro installation disk with this portable. 
The portable has a second partition with XP on it, used for recovery.
This partition is located at the end of the drive. 
They (HP) included instructions for recovery and reinstallation 
for XP.  36 hours later, I'm getting pretty close to nuking the XP
and if I cannot restore XP from the disk, I will just purchase
XP-pro and install it on the new (reduced size) partition. Can I 
reformat the drive make a smaller partition for XP and recover 
XP from the  the XP installation/recovery partition to a smaller  
partition. say 30 Gig.Sound like a viable option?

 Is there any free download software (even if it's a binary) to 
defrag this ntfs partition, for an amd64 ? Googling for 
{O&ODefrag +amd64 } does not produce anything useful.


James









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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: amd64 installation: which file system?

[Richard Fish]

On 7/18/06, James <wireless@tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
> Well I did not get a XP-pro installation disk with this portable.
> The portable has a second partition with XP on it, used for recovery.

[Way OT] I know some manufacturers do this, and it is one of the
dumbest things I've ever heard of.  Why do consumers accept this?  You
save $0.05c on the cost of a CD, at the risk of having *no* recovery
option at all if the HD fails.  It's just stupid.

If these are new systems, I would give HP support a call and demand
they send you the WinXP OEM installation CD.

> XP from the  the XP installation/recovery partition to a smaller
> partition. say 30 Gig.Sound like a viable option?

My XP system under VMWare is on a 10Gb virtual disk, although I use
NTFS compression there.  It depends on what you want to use it for,
but my guess is that 30Gb should be more than enough for basic XP
tasks.

>  Is there any free download software (even if it's a binary) to
> defrag this ntfs partition, for an amd64 ? Googling for
> {O&ODefrag +amd64 } does not produce anything useful.

Under windows, I use O&ODefrag from http://www.oo-software.com.  It
isn't free, but there is a 30-day trial available.  It is also windows
only (they had a Linux beta, but not for NTFS, and it sucked big-time.
 Corrupted filesystems, no response from their support line, etc etc.
Seems to have been withdrawn).

-Richard
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[gentoo-user] Re: amd64 installation: which file system?

[James]

Richard Fish <bigfish <at> asmallpond.org> writes:

> 
> On 7/18/06, James <wireless <at> tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
> > Well I did not get a XP-pro installation disk with this portable.
> > The portable has a second partition with XP on it, used for recovery.

> [Way OT] I know some manufacturers do this, and it is one of the
> dumbest things I've ever heard of.  Why do consumers accept this?  You
> save $0.05c on the cost of a CD, at the risk of having *no* recovery
> option at all if the HD fails.  It's just stupid.

Yes HP is one of them. Purchased the system through Office Depot.
Will not make this mistake again.


> If these are new systems, I would give HP support a call and demand
> they send you the WinXP OEM installation CD.

After blowing away the NTFS (XP) stuff via reformatting. I'm going to
see if I can install/restore XP from the backup partition to 
the newly reduced 30Meg partition.

If HP forces me to choose between gentoo and XP, by_by XP.


> > XP from the  the XP installation/recovery partition to a smaller
> > partition. say 30 Gig.Sound like a viable option?

> My XP system under VMWare is on a 10Gb virtual disk, although I use
> NTFS compression there.  It depends on what you want to use it for,
> but my guess is that 30Gb should be more than enough for basic XP
> tasks.

Yes I know the 10.6 gig of XP will fit, what I was looking for 
is an opinion on blowing away the orginal XP on the 85 gig partition,
reformatting with several new partitions for Gentoo and XP and using
the XP restore from the 9 gig partition as the end of the drive, where
the HP-XP restore software is located. The machine runs find on 
experimental amd64 liveCD, so I know it will be fine with Gentoo.
It's always nice to keep winbloze around, but, I'm getting real
tire of wasting my time.

Does this sound like a reasonable approach? 

If nobody posts a better idea by tomorrow morning, it's by by XP.....

> >  Is there any free download software (even if it's a binary) to
> > defrag this ntfs partition, for an amd64 ? Googling for
> > {O&ODefrag +amd64 } does not produce anything useful.
> 
> Under windows, I use O&ODefrag from http://www.oo-software.com.  It
> isn't free, but there is a 30-day trial available.  It is also windows
> only (they had a Linux beta, but not for NTFS, and it sucked big-time.
>  Corrupted filesystems, no response from their support line, etc etc.
> Seems to have been withdrawn).

Yes but that's not amd64 nor a free download. If I have to purchase
something, It'll be a $10 bootleg XP disk, since this system already
has a XP-pro license. NO f___ing wonder everybody hates microsoft.....
Bill Gates is a real putz. I guess Bruce Perens (busybox et. al.)
was not able to help HP develop any common sense.

Our last 3 portables were all clevo, and we never had a problem like 
this, all are set up dual boot. No wonder American companies are going 
down the tubes.....



James




-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: amd64 installation: which file system?

[Mick]

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On Wednesday 19 July 2006 05:31, James wrote:

> Yes HP is one of them. Purchased the system through Office Depot.
> Will not make this mistake again.

In the UK at least HP sell refurbished and slightly obsolete components with 
one year warranty on ebay.  If you bid when the footy, Wimbledon, etc., is on 
the telly you can get a pretty descent box for a relatively low price.  Of 
course, there's morons who keep outbidding themselves and push up prices for 
everyone else . . . but even so it's worth looking into it.  Buying HP_Compaq 
from a shop is an absolute no-no, unless they're throwing the darn things 
out.  It occasionally happens, but not that often.  Unfortunately, with a low 
price comes the 'compaqified' installation image.  The best solution that I 
have found is to shrink the partition with gparted *before* the machine is 
ever booted up and image this smaller partition onto a DVD - should you ever 
want to resell the computer.

>
> > If these are new systems, I would give HP support a call and demand
> > they send you the WinXP OEM installation CD.

They will.  But at a price (not much) and guess what, it is an image of the 
original installation which as far as I recall requires the whole of the disk 
for it to be installed again!  Can you believe them!

> After blowing away the NTFS (XP) stuff via reformatting. I'm going to
> see if I can install/restore XP from the backup partition to
> the newly reduced 30Meg partition.

Surprise me if this works
> If HP forces me to choose between gentoo and XP, by_by XP.

>
> Yes I know the 10.6 gig of XP will fit, what I was looking for
> is an opinion on blowing away the orginal XP on the 85 gig partition,
> reformatting with several new partitions for Gentoo and XP and using
> the XP restore from the 9 gig partition as the end of the drive, where
> the HP-XP restore software is located.

Surprise me again for the reasons mentioned above.  I believe that it will 
either overwrite the partitions you've created or bomb out with an error.

> If nobody posts a better idea by tomorrow morning, it's by by XP.....

I have been successful with a number of 32bit HP-Compaq machines by doing the 
following:

Boot into WinXP and uninstall all system software and applications (e.g. 
Windoze IM, Outlook Express, etc.) that you do not need.  Refrag the machine 
using the native defrag application from the Administrative Tools.  Reboot 
<--> defrag.  Repeat the cycle of rebooting and defragging a couple more 
times until there is no discernible fragmentation.  Use gparted to resize the 
partition and create new as required.  So far I had no failures, although on 
some older machines with low memory the shrinking can take absolute ages (it 
doesn't fail, just takes forever).

> > >  Is there any free download software (even if it's a binary) to
> > > defrag this ntfs partition, for an amd64 ? Googling for
> > > {O&ODefrag +amd64 } does not produce anything useful.

Please forgive me if I have missed a critical point in this thread - why does 
it have to be 64bit?  Won't the WinXP 32bit defrag tool do the job?
-- 
Regards,
Mick

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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: amd64 installation: which file system?

[Bo Ørsted Andresen]

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On Wednesday 19 July 2006 09:14, Mick wrote:
> > > If these are new systems, I would give HP support a call and demand
> > > they send you the WinXP OEM installation CD.
>
> They will.  But at a price (not much) and guess what, it is an image of the
> original installation which as far as I recall requires the whole of the
> disk for it to be installed again!  Can you believe them!

Then it's not the OEM Installation CD. I would accept no less as consider this 
kind of recover approach completely useless. I would never accept to have a 
useless 9 GB partition sitting around just for reinstalls. I would rather by 
Windows directly from Microsoft than accept that kind of crap.

So what I would do is reconsider if I really needed Windows or demand an OEM 
Installation CD from Toshiba or buy directly from Microsoft or buy a computer 
from another vendor... And scrap all partitions and start from scratch.

-- 
Bo Andresen

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Re: [gentoo-user] Re: amd64 installation: which file system?

[Bo Ørsted Andresen]

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On Wednesday 19 July 2006 01:38, Richard Fish wrote:
> Things like
> c:\hiberfil.sys and c:\$log are nearly impossible to move, so they
> could be the source of the problem.

hiberfil is easily movable (Well, it's Windows... requires you to go to the 
power settings in the control panel and disable hibernation, then defrag and 
finally reenable...). pagefile is a bit harder as it requires you to reboot 
ones or twice.... The approach, however, would be the same...

-- 
Bo Andresen

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