20060925
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- 20060925
Monday September 25, 2006 Joe will be installing Vista as a class exercise. He wants us to think about how to install Vista, and what should be done prior to the install. How should he go about installing Vista? There is no significant software on the system. It is fresh from the factory. Vista install possibilities: 1. Reformat/Install 2. Dual Boot after formatting 3. Upgrade The Toshiba has all sorts of special drivers for the touchpad, fingerprint reader, and so on. It is a Toshiba Satellite U205 with a 100G HD. My answer: I'd procede as follows: 1. Use Knoppix and partimage to copy the hd as it is now to my server. 2. Use Knoppix and ntfsresize to shrink hda1 down to 10G. 3. Use Knoppix and fdisk to repartition as
hda1 10G ntfs (unchanged) hda2 30G ntfs hda3 30G ntfs hda4 windows extended hda5 10G linux hda6 2G linux swap hda7 5G FAT unformatted about 30G
4. Install Fedora Core 5 linux on hda5.
Use dd under fedora to back up the master boot record
5. Install Vista on hda2. 6. Restore the master boot record so that I could use Grub. What happens next would depend on how the Vista install works out. If everything goes well with my Vista install, I keep going. Alternatively, if there was someting I really needed from XP that I couln't get into Vista, I'd copy the XP install from hda1 to hda3 and try an upgrade from XP to Vista on hda3. If everything goes to heck, I can use Knoppix and partimage to go back to the way the laptop came from the store.
Oct. 8, 15, 22 MSCE/MCSA class Sundays from 10-2.
Today's lecture Disk Management See chapter 10 in the book. Dynamic disk, a new kind of disk in XP Professional. Dynamic disk was available in some of the server products.
Basic disks and primary partitions: In the Microsoft world, your OS has to be on a primary partition (not an extended partition) Extended partition can be broked up into volumes. Dynamic Disk Volumes have lots of cool options:
They can span physical disks. They can be striped volumes. Sort of like RAID. Makes Disk I/O a lot faster.
Then Joe gave a little talk on RAID arrays. RAID 5 sounded really useful. It is usually done in hardware.
The initial install of XP Pro has to be to a basic disk. You convert to a dynamic disk later if you want. You can't go back to a basic without reformatting. You use the Disk Management snap-in for these tasks.
Joe went through how to use the Disk Management snap-in. See, for example, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309000 "How to use Disk Management to configure basic disks in Windows XP" Joe showed the Disk Management display for dynamic disks on his laptop. Then we created new partitions in our unallocated space. On XP, you can mount a new volume in an empty NTFS folder. (this is new) There are three options:
New Partition Wizard
Format Partition
To store data on this partition, you must format it first.
Choose wheter you want to format this partition, and if so, what setting you want to use.
Do not format this partition
Format this partition with the following settings:
File system: NTFS, FAT, FAT32
Allocation unit size: Default, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16K, 32K, 64K
(This controls how much data the hd can store and how quickly the data access will be. It is the miniminum
amount of data that can be written to a disk. A smaller allocation unit is more efficient if you have a lot of small file, etc.)
Volume label:
Perform a quick format (Select if disk hasn't been used before. Not needed for a drive that has been working.)
Enable file and folder compression. (Part of ntfs, -- nothing to do with winzip or other utilities.(There is another thing
called Folder Compression that is compatible with other stuff.))
You can implement disk quotas on an ntfs volume. Compression conflicts with encryption in ntfs. You can't use both.
We ended up with a 1.95 GB G: drive.
Joe and Kat are still looking for students to be on the ASB committee.
On the new partition, G: You can right click on it and select "Mark Partition as Active". That changes the MBR so that the machine will try to boot from that drive. If you do that, the machine wont boot because G: doesn't have a ntldr file.
Now make an extended partition using the remaing 6166MB. Notice that you get a green color rather than a blue colored bar.
Now create a New Logical drive of 2000MB. Format as FAT32.
You can convert a FAT32 volume to NTFS with MS tools. You can't convert NTFS to FAT with MS tools without reformatting and so on.
You want to keep a FAT volume like a little flash drive around to remove bogus NTFS attributes.
Next: Create a mount point in C:\public\freespace Disk Manager Make the freespace folder using Windows Explorer
Make yet another logical drive of 2000MB... You get a choice of FAT or NTFS format. Use NTFS. Then you get a partition accessible as the directory. You can use this to do stuff like expand your system, like moving log files around: C:\windows\logfiles (C is getting full) C:\windows\new-logs (make new empty dir) Then make a directory mapped to the new dir. Then copy the log files to the new dir. Then rename the folders. Now the log files will be written to the new disk.
In the command window freespace shows up as a <JUNCTION>
For a discussion of NTFS compression versus Compressed (zipped) Folders, see http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/ff_file_compress_overview.mspx?mfr=true "File compression overview"
Folder Comperssion 1. Any file system 2. Compatile with other OSes 3. Seperate utility 4. Applies only to folder 5. Compatible with ntfs encryption
NTFS compression 1. only on NTFS volume 2. Microsoft NTFS 3. Part of OS 4. Volume/Folder/File level 5. Mutually exclusive of encryption.
When you turn on ntfs compression the folder name appears in blue. When you copy a folder, the compression attribute is inherited from the new container. When you move (rename) the compression is preserved.
Lynda Reeves
