h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm going to try puppy instead. Look what I found on the internet:

'Resizing NTFS partition impose you to reboot the system !
DON'T DO any other operations on this partition before the reboot,
otherwise you will get errors. After the boot-up Windows logo,
the system will show a special screen, and a message
asking about drive consistency : Checking file system on c : '

Obviously nothing to do with swapping although that might be in error aswell.

You didn't tell me about setting a flag; I've been on this for days trying to avoid install from a disc directly, which I have now done but with a heart attack when it thought sdb1 was Huwai technologies mass storage device.

I disconnected it and reset, now I've got puppy running on external.

Er, , I think... ;-/

Now I've got to learn how to use it. At least it has things you can click on, not like slax.

So which files are the executables. Which extensions?

It is all new stuff to me, it has detected my modem but can't install since it is .exe.

I have got wine but nothing in it to install. .tz files ect

It only installs doggy files, of the extension .pet. It claims to have a tool for conversion to .pet and points to the application (wine) for installing .exe files.

So on the command line type:

tgz2pet wine-1.1.1.9-1kjz.tgz

but the file is wine-1.1.1.9-1kgz.gz

I can't put up with this I'm dislexic, it takes me ages to see things like that.

So it don't work.

I don't understand the fun some people have in writing lines after lines of nonsensical commands. I just looked around for another file called .pet and it did install and does run windows apart from the Huwai one.

I wanted selfImage to work but it cannot see past the partition it is in.

Can't install the G4L thing.

This puppy thing comes with two backup applications; can linux access ntfs file systems?

If you have a 2.4 kernel you can read them; with a 2.6 you can both read and write them.

kernel 2.6.21.7

Too few options in openSuse for install, how do you choose your own pre-prepared partitions rather than advice given in their forum to delete windows and start from scratch. Or any other 64 bit linux.

I don't understand their advice to delete all partitions because resize is unreliable.

Remember that a fair proportion of the folk on the forums don't know any more than you do...

Have a look at the Wiki at http://www.opensuse.org - I've always found it to be very helpful. Just remember to notice if they're talking about something that's only applicable to an older release.

Can't resize hda0 the main drive??

Gparted says it has bad sectors??

Seatools say it hasn't??

Smart says it hasn't??

chkdsk/f/r says after 3 hours it hasn't??

Downloaded new Gparted but the same.

Gparted says run with --bad-sectors in options but no such options and --bad-sectors in terminal and every variation thereof is a bad command.

So it looks like I'm not getting Linux.

Done the long Seatools test and it passed; several other tests all passed but not even OpenSuse will let me partition the disc, it wants me to remove Windows.

Important question; can you restore XP to a smaller partition, I feel that it would not work because pointers would be wrong.

I know how to do it now and you can forget it, I can see why people think linux is hard; to install a linux go into the command line...ending up finally with removing grub from the first partition and installing it in root.

Gparted is a linux program and either it is wrong or Seagate is.

"Important question; can you restore XP to a smaller partition, I feel that it would not work because pointers would be wrong."

I don't know. You'd have to read the documentation of the program you used to back it up.

I beginning to think it may be worthwhile to pay for a program. The free ones don't come with much documentation.

Every time I see a tutorial about gParted they say 'and naughty windows tells you off for shrinking it', when in fact it is gParted that sets a flag for windows to do its three hour check.

It is gParted that uses another application that erroneously detects faults, and the other program is a linux program.

From somewhere it detects faults, but it didn't do a scan because that takes hours, it didn't get it from smart because that says drive ok, so the only other place it gets it from is windows.

How smart is that.

If I wrote the program, it would alert the user to POSSIBLE defects and advise against proceeding; but it would not completely block any progress in the STUPID idea that that somehow returning a drive saves your data.

I think I'll get this

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/pm-personal/

I've got a couple of copies of PM8, and while it's good it's no better than GPartEd.