Re: tlug: Re: splitting windoze

["Jonathan Byrne" <jpmag@example.com>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Joe Marchak <joem@example.com>

>Mount the NT disk on Linux, and take the image off as a tgz
file onto
>a Linux box.  Then you can re-partition the NT disk using
FDISK,
>re-format the NT partition using the NT install disks (you
also have to
>have the NT disk to do this).  Then you can mount the
target disk as VFAT

You can, as long as you aren't running NTFS.  However, the
performance and reliability of NTFS make it something you
don't really want to give up for the much less robust FAT
file system.  A good compromise here might be to divide the
NT partition itself into two partitions: an NTFS partition
which holds NT itself, plus all applications that are
installed in it, and a VFAT partition that holds the data
files being used under NT.  This would give Linux access to
the data files of NT apps that a person may need access to,
but at the same time will allow NT to run under NTFS.

Of course, with Windows 95, this is less of an issue,
although it does come up if the Windows 95 disk is a FAT 32
file system.  There you have two choices: follow a procedure
as above, with FAT 32 for Windows 95 and its applications,
with a VFAT partition for the data files, or you can just
make the whole thing VFAT.  This uses disk space much less
efficiently than FAT 32, however, since FAT32 uses 4K
clusters even on large disks, whereas VFAT and FAT 16 use
32K clusters on large disks.

Kei's suggestion of just installing another hard disk also
has a great deal of merit.  Disk drives are cheap, and this
is the most trouble-free installation you could make, since
no partitioning is involved.  Each operating system gets its
own hard disk.  This has merit in a dual-boot situation,
since Windows isn't necessarily all that graceful about
sharing a disk :-)  Just install Linux on the new disk,
install LILO or the boot manager of your choice in the MBR
of C, and you're all set.

Cheers,

Jonathan

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