Resizing and moving Xp and Vista with help from Linux

[saikee]

irlandes,

If a useless person generates a useless post there is a chance the double negative effect can make a it positive again!

Mandriva is not alone in providing Gparted or other resizing program that can do resizing, creating the partitions, formatting them and then hands over the partitions to the installer to complete the installation in one sweeping operation. Ubuntu and Suse are also very keen on this idea.

I am rather uncomfortable with this approach myself because if something goes pear shape then not only the new Linux will not boot but the original operating system may also be broken. In such case I would have no idea of which part of the operation has gone wrong, making the corrective action nearly impossible. Being an old school I still encourage users to resize the existing system first, check that it is still working happily before embarking on a new installation, instead compounding one problem with another.

To resize a partition by trimming back its right boundary is not a demanding task as this is where the empty space lies. This operation apparently can be executed quickly by every resizing software.

The moving of a bootable partition, thus changing the left boundary, is a bigger challenge for every operating system.

My theory is that the Bios only reads the MBR which is only one sector large. The remaining portion of the boot loader has to reside in a partition's boot sector which is the starting point of every Fat16, Fat32, NTFS and Ext2/3 partition. This partition may not be the first partition and so far away from the MBR. As the MBR has little intelligence to operate it must find its second part by hard-coding the hard disk address of the partition it came from. Thus moving the partition away from its starting point in the hard disk simply sabotaging the booting process.

I find whenever I move a booting partition I have to restore its boot loader, unless the resizing software does this process for me. Apparently Vista is the same in this respect.