[ILUG] VMware alternatives.

[Niall Walsh]

Paul Jakma wrote:

> If your XP partition(s) are VFAT (no idea what XP uses), you can CD 
> boot or network boot Linux, mount those partitions and backup your 
> windows filesystem in their entirety to a network host, then 
> repartition, install Linux and restore your windows fs as-it-was when 
> you first boot Linux. (added benefit that you wont have windows 
> reinstalling the MBR on you if you install windows.. and you'll have a 
> 'snapshot' of your windows host to make your next-reinstall of Windows 
> less painful).
>
XP Partitions are usually ntfs though you can choose to use fat 
partitions when you install.

Linux has perfectly good read only support for ntfs, but rw support for 
ntfs still isn't quite trustworthy unless you use captive-ntfs (or at 
least that's still how I understand it).  Captive-ntfs works by 
extracting the MS ntfs drivers from your partition and then using those 
to access the disk (the performance overhead is significant though I 
understand).

The only time I had to resize an ntfs partition I used the ASPLinux 
installation which uses some acronis binaries to do the resizing, this 
was about 2 years ago and was the only free (as in coke) way to do it.  
Now ntfs resizing support can be done with Free software like parted, 
but no matter what way you do it, you want your backup!

Anyone know if XP would stand up to simply having it's files copied off, 
partition reformatted and back on and still boot?

My approach would probably be to dd+compress the partition over the 
network to another machine and then to resize the windows partition, if 
it fails you can restore a prefect pre-snapshot and then try another 
resizing approach.   If you are trying to resize ntfs partitions, I 
would seriously recommend giving them a thorough defrag first!

Niall Walsh