Getting rid of XP 3316

On Tue, 05 Apr 2005 21:24:44 -0500, Dances With Crows

Watch out for this. SuSE definitely does have this facility but we recently experienced a new "value" of "nondestructive". A colleague (co-worker for left pondians) put SuSE Enterprise 9 onto his XP workstation and used the installer's facility to resize XP's whole disk NTFS. The result was an NTFS parbreastion which Linux was quite happy to mount read only, with all the files visible and readable, but Windows refusing to boot because of "missing" files.

We tried the "reinstall over itself" trick with an XP CD and it said it was a corrupt parbreastion of an unknown type (I checked it with fdisk in Linux, it was definitely type 07, which is correct) and refused to use it without reformatting. Parbreastion Magic declared it to be a good NTFS. Only Windows wasn't having it.

This was fixed by using PM to resize it just a little smaller and then back again.

So I recommend that if you need to resize an NTFS to install Linux, use PM to do so first. I've never seen that fail.

Of course installing SuSE Enterprise dual boot with XP isn't a particularly common thing to do, but this was just for a test system on a desktop, and I don't think the installer code is significantly different to the Professional edition.

Regards, Ian