Re: Dual boot GNU and Windows 7

[Joel Roth]

On Sat, Mar 26, 2011 at 04:52:54PM +0000, Sebastian Tennant wrote:
> Quoth Piscium <address@hidden>:
> > What version of Windows do you have?
> 
> Windows 7.
> 
> > I remember reading a while back that resizing Windows Vista partitions with
> > Gparted can make it unbootable (XP should be fine though). Not sure if that
> > is still the case, or what is the deal for Windows 7.
> 
> Funny, I just read something similar.  As a result I thought I'd try resizing
> using Windows' own disk tool and this is what it tells me:
> 
>  "You cannot shrink a volume beyond the point where any unmovable files are
>   located."
> 
>        Total size before shrink: 431938 MB
>  Size of available shrink space: 201358 MB
>         Total size after shrink: 230580 MB
> 
> Can you believe it!

The Minitool Partition Wizard live CD can move "unmovable files"
and handles other details to be able to shrink a Windows 
partition. It's free, very slick, and Linux under the hood.

I did this for Windows 7 (on a recent Thinkpad) It is
occasionally convenient to be able to verify that hardware
works under windows.

I'm not sure if you need to, but I turned off Windows paging
before the shrink.

 
> The 35 GB of data actually on the disk is somehow distributed over 230 GB of
> disk space in such a way that none of the remaining 195 GB of empty space can
> be used for anything else.  How brain-damaged is that!
> 
> I'm actually wondering whether or not I should bother keeping Windows now.
> 
> > Usually it is recommended to put swap towards the beginning of the disk as
> > disk access is faster. 4 GB may be excessive, I have 3 GB swap in mine and I
> > don't remember ever using more than 100 MB.
> 
> Thanks for the tip.  I'll set aside 2 GB nearer the start of the disk.
> 
> > Grub does not "overwrite the existing Windows bootloader" rather it
> > overwrites the MBR which in your case points to the Windows boot loader.
> 
> Ah... and the Windows bootloader resides on the Windows boot partition.  I 
> see.
> Thanks for correcting my thinko.
> 
> > Anyway, the combination of Grub2 + os-prober works reliably so I
> > wouldn't expect and issue.
> 
> That's good to know.
> 
> > You need the Windows CD that came with your PC,
> 
> No such thing, but I've made a Windows 'rescue disk'.
> 
> > set your BIOS to boot from CD.
> 
> Already done that.
> 
> > After you boot from the Windows CD you go in Windows command mode (that is 
> > no
> > graphical interface), I think you need to choose a rescue option. There is a
> > command to restore the MBR so that it makes it point again to the Windows
> > boot loader. I forgot what it is but should be easy for you to google
> > it. After you run the command you reboot normally (without the CD) and it
> > goes into Windows.
> 
> Thanks very much.  This is just what I needed to know.
> 
> Seb
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-- 
Joel Roth