Re: [SLUG] partitioning for Linux and XP

From: Joe Brandt (vzd1s11k@verizon.net)
Date: Mon Apr 13 2009 - 09:06:44 EDT


On Saturday 11 April 2009 09:49:40 am Eben King wrote:
> I got a 312 GiB (marketed as "320 GB") SATA drive and a USB case. My aim
> is to use it as a bootable backup for my 78 GiB / 80 GB internal drive, and
> also to hold XP. To that end, I partitioned it as follows:
>
> partition mount point size
> 1 / backup 15.5 GiB
> 2 swap 2.3 GiB
> 3 /usr backup 4.2 GiB
> 4 extended 276.9 GiB (eg the rest of the disk)
> 5 /home backup way too big ... I'll deal with that
> 6 XP 49.9 GiB
> (more unpartitioned space)
>
> So the XP installer complains there's no XP-compatible partition available,
> but it won't say what it wants. Good design, folks. Anyone know what it
> wants? I tried making it "bootable" and also setting the same flag for
> partition 6, no go. I deleted and recreated the partition using XP's own
> utility, no dice. Does it need to be primary? The first, $DEITY forbid?
> Can I make it like it wants it, then use gparted to move it to where I want
> it?
>
> And fdisk complains for partitions 1-4 that "Partition N does not end on
> cylinder boundary.". I guess that for each of those, I need to note what
> cylinder it ends on now, delete then remake it so it ends on a cylinder
> boundary. Unless there's a way to clean it up non-destructively?

I have attempted to boot Microsoft from an external drive. I learned that it
drops the usb stack during the boot process and picks it up later, thus making
it impossible to boot from an usb device. Unless they have fixed that within
the last couple of years you are out of luck even if you come up with a
workable partition.

Joe Brandt
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