Knoppix - dual boot with WIN7 Home on a Lenovo AMD laptop

[brpy1]

Hi Does anyone know if it is possible to re-partition a single drive in a lenovo laptop and install Knoppix in conjunction with Win7 home edition? I use Fedora as my only OS on my desktop, but I've looked at a Knoppix Live DVD and am very interested. Would like to try it for general purposes before a full HD installation. Thanks Brpy

[Werner P. Schulz]

First of all, let us know it there is an empty partition on the laptop.
fdisk -l(lowercase L!)

[brpy1]

Werner - no, no empty partition - the hard drive is a 512 gigabyte job, all formatted to ntfs. I was hoping that Knoppix had the ability to shrink the windows partition to about 50% of the HD, with Knoppix being installed on the rest. If this is not possible, I should be able to do this through Win7, but would have preferred to let Knoppix handle the task.

However, should I use a 3rd party utility to shrink the windows partition, will Knoppix be able to install to the new partition (I can, from memory, create a root (/) partition, a swap partition, and a /home partition), IE, can Knoppix create a grub installer which will recognise both windows and Knoppix?

Sorry for being so long winded, but I didn't get a W7 disk with the laptop, and would prefer not to damage that OS at this stage.

Thanks

[Werner P. Schulz]

You didn't answer my question - the output of "fdisk -l".

Of course, you can shrink the Windows partition with "gparted" (within Knoppix) and install Grub.

Doesn't offer Lenovo the possibility to burn 3 DVDs to rescue Windows7? Do it!

[brpy1]

Warner - thank you - sorry about the fdisk business, but I know there are no spare partitions on the HD. I'll initiate options 2 and 3 above now - though not necessarily in that order. Again, many, many thanks.

[Werner P. Schulz]

As I know, Lenovo uses only three primary partitions: hidden boot partition, Windows partition and rescue partition. Therefore you have the ability to create a primary partition #4 and within this multiple logical partitions.

If Lenovo uses four primary partitons you've a problem, but not insoluble.

[ICPUG]

Why the aversion to letting Windows reduce the size of the NTFS partition?

My rule of thumb is to use the Windows tool to create/edit NTFS partitions and use a Linux tool (GParted) to create/edit Linux partitions.

So in this case I would use the inbuilt Windows 7 tool to reduce the NTFS partition and create some free space. Then I would use GParted to create partitions for Linux in the free space.

Why do I suggest this? Well, Microsoft do not release all their knowledge of NTFS and I am not convinced GParted developers have been able to glean it all with the confidence I require.

[utu]

I would use the inbuilt Windows 7 tool to reduce the NTFS partition
Where do I find this inbuilt tool?
Thanks.

[Werner P. Schulz]

In german version of Windows 7:

Systemsteuerung => Verwaltung => Computerverwaltung => Datenträgerverwaltung

right-Mouseclick on the partition you want to shrink => Volume verkleinern ..

I never used it!

[utu]

Danke, Herr Schulz.
A handy fact to know.

[ICPUG]

In the English version of Windows 7

Control Panel - Systems and Security - Administative Tools - Create and Format Hard Disk Partition

A pictorial view of your partitions is displayed

Right click the partition to resize and select Shrink Volume