Persistent Home, will my existing windows partition be safe?

No, I think what you are doing is fine. All I was suggesting is that since most HP's that I've seen have two optical drives - one which can read or write (your dvd burner), and one which can only read - I was suggesting running the live CD from the one which can only read, since that would give you the most flexibility (whichever one you use to run Knoppix cannot be used for anything else during the Knoppix session, so if you use the read only drive for running the Knoppix live CD, you can still read AND write with the other).

jd

One last problem j.drake:
I made my persistent home 776 out of 786 megs. I then got knoppix to load my persistent home and config. I checked out my persistent home folder and it says that the size is 345 megs, with 1 meg used. Where did the other 430 megs go? Also, once I save my config file will it automatically update each change that I make or will I have to update it after I make a change? Thanks.

I don't pretend to know the mechanics of how PH and configs work, so I don't know about the file size issue.

As far as whether you have to update, I don't think so - at least I don't. One thing I've found is that if I save the config in the same drive as my PH, is seems as if I don't have to use the my config bootcode - just the "home=" bootcode. For example, I recently redid my linux drive (hdb) after upsizing my NTFS Windows drive. I have my PH and configs on hdb1, save my Knoppix file system on hdb5, swap on hdb6, and hdb3 isFAT32, for whatever I want to share between OSes. When I boot, my bootprompt is "knoppix26 fromhd=/dev/hdb5 home=/dev/hdb1"

jd

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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.

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No I don't think there is a windows version. But if you want to use knoppix or the other cd then I can still help you.


After you get qtparted up, click on the hardrive and let it search it.
Find your NTFS partition and right click it. Select resize and take off about 15 gig. Select ok then go up the the menu and select commit.(Or whatever there is,)

firebyrd10: I only have about 20 GB free, is that okay? Also, it the chance that QTparted will screw up my ntsf very small? Also, I haven't defraged in a while, do I have to? I was thinking of doing the poor man's install, so I guess the main os will take about 2 GB leaving me 13 free for persistent home. Any help you could give would be great. Also, (I'm sure this is a dumb question) how do I install downloaded programs (not klik). I just downloaded mplayer, and there is a file called install, but I don't think it has a extension. For console, do I type something like cd (from DOS) and my directory? Thanks

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Originally Posted by Garibaldi

firebyrd10: I only have about 20 GB free, is that okay? Also, it the chance that QTparted will screw up my ntsf very small? Also, I haven't defraged in a while, do I have to? I was thinking of doing the poor man's install, so I guess the main os will take about 2 GB leaving me 13 free for persistent home. Any help you could give would be great. Also, (I'm sure this is a dumb question) how do I install downloaded programs (not klik). I just downloaded mplayer, and there is a file called install, but I don't think it has a extension. For console, do I type something like cd (from DOS) and my directory? Thanks

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Yea, although ntfsresizer has little chance of screwing up your partition, defragging will help. Makes things faster too. Also if you see you only see 1 gig free on qtparted but you know that you have alot more then that free, you need to defrag.

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Yea, although ntfsresizer has little chance of screwing up your partition, defragging will help. Makes things faster too. Also if you see you only see 1 gig free on qtparted but you know that you have alot more then that free, you need to defrag.

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Is ntfsresizer and qtparted the same thing? Also, if it did screw up my hdd, could I still recover the info if I plugged the hdd into another computer? What steps can I take to lessen the chances of it screwing up my hdd?

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Originally Posted by Garibaldi

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Yea, although ntfsresizer has little chance of screwing up your partition, defragging will help. Makes things faster too. Also if you see you only see 1 gig free on qtparted but you know that you have alot more then that free, you need to defrag.

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Is ntfsresizer and qtparted the same thing? Also, if it did screw up my hdd, could I still recover the info if I plugged the hdd into another computer? What steps can I take to lessen the chances of it screwing up my hdd?

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Qtparted is just a GUI to a program called parted which does all the work.

Ntfsresizer? Just thing of that as a plugin.

As with any program that screws around with a hardrive like this, you are recommended to back up your data. I don't think putting the hardrive in another PC would fix things, but you may still be able to get your data, depending on what went wrong.

To help lessen the chance of something going wrong, make sure you hardrive is defragged (try to get most of the data near the front of the drive) Make sure the hardrive is unmounted and not being used. Don't run any other programs. Do one thing at a time (If you want to resize a partition then add a ext2 partiton, first resize, then make the new one).
Last, try to get the most up to date version of both (qtparted and ntfsresizer), Check out my link earlier in the thread.


Thats about it. Just the general stuff.

firebyrd10: Thanks, I'll let you know... My 144 gb drive is almost full so my defrag is going to take forever...

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Originally Posted by eco2geek

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.

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Not really true. There are three totally different NTFS drivers for Linux. The 2.4 kernel has a crappy and limited driver and the 2.6 has a much more advanced one but there is a backport to 2.4 as well. Write is completely disabled in 2.4 and Knoppix doesn't use the advanced driver's backport. The advanced driver supports read-write persistent homes SAFELY for over two years now. Several other distros have this feature for a long time. The first one was Phat Linux in 2002, running Linux fully read-write from NTFS. Corrently the most popular such distro is TopologiLinux but there are more.

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Originally Posted by eco2geek

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

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Still not everything is implemented in the advanced driver but what's released that's fully working and very stable. For example I've also resized quite a lot of NTFS on Linux and never experienced any corruption or lost data.