On Jan 14, 2008 2:26 PM, Mike Bird <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Mon January 14 2008 03:47:32 Chris Bannister wrote: > > On Wed, Jan 09, 2008 at 04:51:21PM -0500, Jimmy Wu wrote: > > > am not a big gamer. The only reason I would have Windows is because > > > there might be unforeseeable circumstances when I may run into Windows > > > only software. I am sure if I needed to, I could always shrink by > > > Debian partition later and install XP, right? > > > > As far as I know, M$ doesn't play friendly with other OS's. XP will want > > all the HD. You are best to install XP, then Debian. There may be ways > > around it but I'm guessing they would be very unpleasant. > > Lenny installer had no problem shrinking the Vista partition and > setting up grub dual boot - actually triple boot on the T61 if you > keep the diag partition (recommended). >
Thanks again for all the input. Given the large amount of HD space I have, I think I will go with keeping Vista and dual booting, although I have a bit of work to do before I can even get into installation: The computer was a gift, and has been preloaded with a bunch of stuff by the person who gave it to me. Included in this bunch of stuff are, among other things, 20 GB of uncompressed audio and lots of software, including Office 2007, Nero 7 Ultra (or something like that, I have never used nero and don't know what it's supposed to be called), and an install of Tomb Raider. Obviously, it would be rather sad to irrevocably wipe all of this away, so I am trying to back up and salvage as much of it as possible. The isos will be relatively easy to back up (I'll just burn them), but I'll have to go in and find the registration / product keys that were used somehow. What makes my job harder is the weird partition scheme, which makes it so I can't just resize a partition or two and move everything that needs to be backed up to some excess space out of the way. I don't really trust what Windows' disk utility tells me, as IIRC it hides the Rescue & Recovery partition, but what it does tell me is as follows: Disk 0 (149 GB): Partition 1: 39 GB (Windows Vista install) Partition 2: 55 GB (all the music, misc .iso's for Vista, Office 2007 and other software installation executables) Partition 3: 55 GB (Tomb Raider-Legend files) Disk 1 (513 MB): Partition 1: 511 MB (I guess this is the recovery partition, but am not sure; it contains one file: ReadyBoost.sfcache (409 MB) ) All partitions are NTFS The Windows Device Manager lists two hard drives: Fujitsu MHW2160BH PL IMD-0 I tried to boot from my Ubuntu 7.04 liveCD to use gParted to get another look at the partition, but the CD wouldn't boot. So I tried a really old (several years old) Knoppix CD I had (Knoppix 4.0), and that booted, but I couldn't figure out how to get Qtparted to show me the partitions (it showed one disk: UNIONFS/dev/hda or something like that, but no partitions) Now that I've given all the background info, I have two main things I'm trying to do: (1) I'm trying to decide if Tomb Raider is worth keeping, especially because I've never played it before and probably won't, and I don't know where the installation .exe is, nor do I have a CD. All that's there is a bunch of cryptic bigfiles (all over 100 MB in size), more cryptic files, two exe's to run the game, an uninstall exe, readme's, and I am guessing hidden in there somewhere save data. I do not know if this mess is salvageable, ie if it will work by just copying everything to another Windows Vista computer. Any ideas/suggestions/opinions on what to do with this? (2) I definitely want to save the music. For the most part, they're split up by CD, with the whole CD audio saved as one file in APE format with a CUE file to go along. There are also a few wav and flac files. But 20 GB is a lot to move, and since it's on the second partition, I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with it yet. Again, suggestions would be appreciated. What I want to do, eventually, is to split up the CD audio into individual tracks, and convert everything to FLAC (going with the open source format). If there any good Linux audio converters that would accomplish that, then I might move everything somewhere else temporarily and sort through it later, after I get Debian installed. If not, I might be stuck with converting all these files on Windows before I can even get started installing Debian. Wow that was a long post. Sorry. Thanks again for your help, Jimmy -- Registered Linux User #454138 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
