Persistent Home, will my existing windows partition be safe?

[Garibaldi]

I wanted to be able to keep the changes that I make to knoppix. I am thinking about doing persistent home, but I want to know if it will corrupt or erase or do anything to damage or make my current ntsc windows xp home operating system unaccessible. Thanks.

[eco2geek]

Do you have a USB key or a partition formatted as FAT32 (or ext2 or ext3) to save it on?

If your hard drive partition(s) is (are) formatted as NTFS, you will not be able to save a persistent home on it (them), because Linux doesn't adequately support writing to NTFS yet.

Knoppix probably wouldn't let you mount a persistent home image from an NTFS partition even if you took the risk and saved it there.

If you don't have a FAT32 (or ext2, or ext3) formatted partition available, your best bet is to use a USB key (they're usually formatted as FAT or FAT32).

And as long as you don't write to NTFS, no, it won't do a darn thing to "harm" Windows.

[Garibaldi]

Here is my exact situation. I have a HP Pavilion desktop. It has a 160 GB harddrive, which has 2 partitions. The first one (C) is 144 GB and contains the windows os and all program files. The other partition (D) is The "HP Recovery" Partition. This is a 16 GB partition with 786 mb free. It contains a copy of the windows xp home OEM version of the os, incase you need to reinstall. The C Partition is NTSC, but the D is FAT32, could I put Knoppix with Poor Man's Install onto this partition, using the 786 mb free space? I'm not too concerned about keeping the hp recovery data (it would be nice though), because hp sent me a cd copy of it too. If this is possible, I have a couple questions. First, in the guide to performing a poor man's install, it says under What You Need To Know 2. that you need to make your disk writable and unmount it. I tried on my D partition and neither of these options are available to me. I did share it though. That is about the only option that they give you. Also, I have usb flashdrive/thumbdrive. I tried using it in Knoppix but it says something like "cannot mount." Its only 32 megs so its not the greatest storage device for an os. Thanks for all the help.

[j.drake]

OK, I think I can help. It just so happens that I have a very similar computer. The key to your dilemma is that the recovery partition is actually hda1, not 2, even though it's D:. Your C: drive is actually hda2. When you try to write to hda2, Knoppix is telling you that you can't, because hda2 is actually your NTFS partition, not your FAT32 partition. It confused the heck out of me, too. If you want to verify (and you should), open up each, and see that the hp folders are in hda1, and things like Program Files are in hda2.

As for myself, I put on a second hd.

I don't think I'd chance resizing the NTFS partition with QtParted or CFdisk. You might be able to siphon away some of that C: drive with Partition Magic, or some other Windows based program, but I wouldn't use linux. If you don't already have Partition Magic, I wouldn't buy it, because you could buy a nice second hd for the same bucks, and have plenty of room. I just bought a 250 GB last week for $150. You could probably double your disk space for the same cost as buying partition magic, then partition it with QtParted in Knoppix however you want.

As for your thumbdrive, try letting Knoppix reformat it as FAT32. That's what I had to do. Look at the "mkfs" command , and the filetype will be "vfat" (what Linux calls FAT32). Before you do that, though, see if you can mount it from the console. Was it plugged in when you booted? If not, plug it in, open a console, and type lsmod. Should probably come up as sda1. Try "sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1". If that won't work, THEN try redoing the file system with the mkfs command.

jd

[Garibaldi]

Here is what I did:
1. I had 786 mb free on the recovery partition, I created a 785 mb persistent home.
2. I rebooted with knoppix home=/dev/hda1 tohd=/dev/hda1, which gave me an error saying that it couldn't copy- not enough freespace, which makes since because I used it all for my persistent home
3. I ran windows and deleted the knoppix.img, my persistent home from the recovery partition
4. Restarted knoppix and ran knoppinx tohd=/dev/hda1, which copied all the files
5. It then loaded knoppix, and I had 106 mb left on the recovery partition, I made a persistent home of 100 mb on the recovery partition. I then rebooted
6. I booted up with knoppix home=search fromhd=/dev/hda1, which gave me an error, filesystem not found, and then gave me very limited options, with pressing the reset key to restart.
I don't know what I am doing wrong. It seems to copy the files to hda1 fine, but then says that there is no filesystem. It also says in the tutorial not to have the persistent home & fromhd on the same partition, why?

[j.drake]

It also says in the tutorial not to have the persistent home & fromhd on the same partition, why?

You can, but you won't be able to unmount the partition if you need to (since that's where the system is running).

I'm not sure what's wrong either, can you still boot the fs by leaving off the home= cheatcode?

jd

[Garibaldi]

I'm not sure what's wrong either, can you still boot the fs by leaving off the home= cheatcode?

I don't know about that. Last night I tried booting one last time with only "knoppix fromhd=/dev/hda1" but it still couldn't find the fs. How much space is needed for the fs? Like I said, I only have 786 mb. Also, what should I do to accoplish this (which of these do I need to do to do this: persistent home, poormans install, save config file): I want to be able to download and install new programs into linux and be able to keep my settings from time to time. Also, I would like it to have good performance. I am guessing that I will need to do all three of those to get that. Finally, how would you recommend me making a persistent home folder, since I can't use the same partition as I'm booting from? I do have a flashdrive that's only 32 megs, not very good. I have it in when I boot, and knoppix shows it on the desktop as sda1, sda2, sda3, and sda4. When I try to click on these it gives me an error on "cannot mount, no fs specified." Maybe I need to format it, could you give me some instructions on how to do that? Thanks.

[j.drake]

Well, bear in mind that the file system just barely fits onto a 700MB CD, and that's with compression. The "tohd" flag takes the this and recreates the file structure on hd. So, although I think there's still some compression, I doubt that it would fit.

Options:

1. Forget "tohd" and "fromhd", boot with live CD, make your hda1 writable, and create a persistent home there. Reboot (still live CD) and save config. Now you are running liveCD with a persistent home and saved config, which is almost as good as poor man's . If your HP is like mine, you probably have two optical drives, one of which is either a CD or DVD burner, and the other one either a CD or DVD reader. On a reboot, when the hp splash is up, poke the F1 key to get into BIOS, go to the boot section, and make sure that your reader is in the boot order where you want it. That way you can still run from CD, and have 786 MB available for your home, plus have one optical drive available for reading and writing. I used this config for a while, and it works fine. The only downside I see is that it is slightly slower that the poor man's. You can still download and install programs from Klik and save files. When you boot, you'll simply enter the codes for your choice of kernel, home and configs.

2. Buy a second hd, and format and partition it to accept whatever you want in linux. That way, if you get to the point where you feel comfortable enough to try a dual boot, you can hdinstall to the second hd

3. Find a program that can safely partition away more of your NTFS drive to FAT32, and try poor man's again.

jd

[firebyrd10]

I don't think I'd chance resizing the NTFS partition with QtParted or CFdisk. You might be able to siphon away some of that C: drive with Partition Magic, or some other Windows based program, but I wouldn't use linux. If you don't already have Partition Magic, I wouldn't buy it, because you could buy a nice second hd for the same bucks, and have plenty of room. I just bought a 250 GB last week for $150. You could probably double your disk space for the same cost as buying partition magic, then partition it with QtParted in Knoppix however you want.
jd

Qtparted uses the plugin ntfsresizer which is very reiable. Given knoppix uses a very outdated version of both ntfsresizer and qtparted so you might want to look into http://www.sysresccd.org/ which has the most uptodate version of any live-cd distro. If needed knoppix can resize without any problems.

[Garibaldi]

Qtparted uses the plugin ntfsresizer which is very reiable. Given knoppix uses a very outdated version of both ntfsresizer and qtparted so you might want to look into http://www.sysresccd.org/ which has the most uptodate version of any live-cd distro. If needed knoppix can resize knoppix without any problems.

Can I run Qtparted from windows? I would like to be as safe as possible, bascially have there be about a 1% chance of something going wrong. If that's the case with Qt Parted then please fill me in with some instructions on how to resize my 144 GB NTSF Partition, siphoning off about 15 GB.

j.drake, Thanks for all the help. I'll probably end up just putting a persistent home on with config for now. I've been booting my Knoppix from the E: drive which came with my pc and is my dvdrw drive. Since it came with the machine I'm sure hp wouldn't put out the bucks to make it 52x, I think its about 24x. I have an Iomega usb cdrw drive with 48x, could I boot knoppix with the cd in that (it might be faster)? Also about the BIOS settings, I could try it but I don't want to take a chance about screwing anything up to the point of not being able to get window again (just to be safe). Since your interested in other oses besides windows, have you tried or heard of pear pc? see www.pearpc.net