Linux/SUSE noob trouble - Resize partition

[OmbooHankvald]

Hi

I have recently installed SUSE 10.0, but unfortunately it has caused me some trouble..

1) It killed Winblows . At the boot screen I can choose Windows or SUSE, but if I choose Windows it just gives me a black screen and it seems to be crunching away for hours. I have tried starting Windows and let it work on starting Windows a couple of hours and when I came back it was in... SUSE? WTF?

2) At the installation on SUSE I didn't give it much room on my HD (only around 2 GB I think) and therefore I have not even got enough room to install OpenOffice (which I badly need!). I figured that since the Windows partition (in SUSE apparently called /dev/hda1) has a lot of free room, I would resize it and 'transfer' some of the free space to SUSE. But as a Linux n00b I just can't figure out how the heck to do it?!
I have heard of 'parted' but don't believe I can use it because Windows is sitting on a NTFS-partition...

3) Do any of you know of a good place on the Internet to find straightforward guides to Linux and/or SUSE? I have never been good at the Console-stuff, but I am willing to learn as long at it is kept as simple as possible.

I hope I'm not too confusing... I am not a Linux guru.

OH

[Peter Nelson]

I know somethings about linux and have now installed Suse 10 on ALL my machines (yay)

Some of these are Suse only and others I have made the windows XP (FAT or NTFS) share the drive with Suse.

I have discovered by trial and error that graphical install of Suse 10 uses more disk space than claimed, and 2GB is not really quite enough with the default packages (include some games etc). You will be lucky if suse boots unless you login command prompt and use text based yast2 to de-install things you don't need. For log files etc size will grow.

Therefore for a GUI install of Suse I recommend an absolute minimum of 3GB of the drive given to Suse.

Well windows is your problem so what can I say....

Well we DO know that on my machine, windows and Suse 10 coexist hapily.

Perhaps you could tell me was your windows drive formatted as NTFS or FAT.

Did you defrag the windows drive in windows before installing suse. Did you also check the drive for errors?

Were any error messages reported by suse installer while trying to resize the windows partition.

Now that you appear to be able to boot into Linux but not into windows, tell me this...

Does the linux mount your windows C drive into its filesystem ie can you see your windows documents from exploring around in Suse?

I assume you already know that windows likes to be put on before suse, and assume you did not do Suse then windows (which won't work).

Hope you can get it working again, post back and I will try to help.

[Peter Nelson]

Re your other question, assuming you get windows working....

It is not a big problem at all to shrink the windows partition further and give progressively more space to the suse.

You can do it using YAST, in GUI if you think carefully I have done this successfully as I migrated more work off windows to linux.

The only thing to consider is YAST won't resize a partition which is currently mounted but there are ways around that.

Assuming windows works, the first step is go into windows and defrag and work out what new size you could afford to shrink it to and still have enough for windows.

Then login to suse and use yast to change the windows/suse ratio so that more disk is free for linux use.

Then either make a new eg data partition in the cleared space and mount it OR change the existing linux partitions to cover the space. If all else fails and this is too complex for you, you did the windows resize so you could just re-install suse from the installation media and accept its partition suggestions (if you back up any important user documents).

I think right now your issue is booting into windows.

So I think you are saying there is a windows entry in the GRUB bootloader but when you choose it screen goes black?

So do you get any "starting windows" type messages?

Can you hit F8 at that point and ask windows to startup in safe mode?

[Peter Nelson]

(As root or Yast will prompt for root superuser password)

YAST
SYSTEM
PARTITIONER

shows the existing partitions.

Highlight and the EDIT and RESIZE buttons are your friends.

As I said though you will have problems resizing a live partition in case something uses it, therefore you have to UNMOUNT the partition, resize it then MOUNT it again. (you can not the mount point, remove it and then put it back to what it was after the resize).

Not difficult just you need to think what you are doing and be careful.

Also did you know Openoffice is also available for windows!
Or you can run many windows programs using WINE in suse10?

[OmbooHankvald]

Originally Posted by Peter Nelson

You will be lucky if suse boots unless you login command prompt and use text based yast2 to de-install things you don't need.

Unfortunately I:
1) Don't know what I don't need
2) Have no idea how to de-install things from text-based (I think I have figured out how to do it on GUI)

Originally Posted by Peter Nelson

Perhaps you could tell me was your windows drive formatted as NTFS or FAT.

NTFS

Originally Posted by Peter Nelson

Did you defrag the windows drive in windows before installing suse. Did you also check the drive for errors?

Defrag: I used Norton DiskOptimizer. Not sure if it does the same but it looked that way...
Check drive: This may be the problem - The last time I saw Windows (yes, I managed to get into Windows once) I asked it to do a 'chkdsk /r' (scan for errors) but it said it was locked and that it would scan at the next boot. After that it won't go into Windows anymore.

Originally Posted by Peter Nelson

Were any error messages reported by suse installer while trying to resize the windows partition.

When I installed SUSE I used some free space on another partition I already had so I didn't resize the partition. I'm going to use the YaST Partitioner in just a second...

Originally Posted by Peter Nelson

Does the linux mount your windows C drive into its filesystem ie can you see your windows documents from exploring around in Suse?

Yes, it resides in /windows/C

Originally Posted by Peter Nelson

I think right now your issue is booting into windows.

Yes, I think so too...

Originally Posted by Peter Nelson

So I think you are saying there is a windows entry in the GRUB bootloader but when you choose it screen goes black?

Exactly

Originally Posted by Peter Nelson

So do you get any "starting windows" type messages?

No, just a black screen with a little 'flashing white line' in the top left corner (the classic DOS 'line' - I don't know what to call it...)

Originally Posted by Peter Nelson

Can you hit F8 at that point and ask windows to startup in safe mode?

No. My guess is that it is chkdsk'ing..

Thank you for your assistance so far!

[Peter Nelson]

The flashing underscore is called the "cursor".

If as you suspect windows is trying to do chkdsk on startup, is your hard drive LED flashing activity during the black screen or does it go out and disk access stops?

Its good that at least your windows files are still there and visible from linux mountpoint.

You may be able to view the (hidden, system) file BOOT.INI or others of windows, by examing the windows partition using linux text editor etc. That may tell you how far it gets through startup processing.

Personally I would try to sort one problem at a time so recover the windows before resizing partitions might be sensible.

Also thinking of the "do something on next windows startup" way it wants to launch chkdsk, if you reboot into windows a few times does this persist or does it give up and try to boot normally? (in which case F8 Safe and go from there).

[moo]

I wonder if resizeing the partition lost some files if anyones ever done a defrag on windows xp you will see in some versions that unmoveable system data is at the 80 to 90 precent area on the disk how big is this disk anyways.

[Peter Nelson]

Originally Posted by moo

I wonder if resizeing the partition lost some files if anyones ever done a defrag on windows xp you will see in some versions that unmoveable system data is at the 80 to 90 precent area on the disk how big is this disk anyways.

Yes MS degrag does not move pagefile from there.

I suspect third party one might (as diskkeeper professional can for example).

The way to fix that is tell windows it can't use a swapfile (maybe even small one). Then defrag. Then create a swapfile again. Look in defrag and you should then see the nice free space where you want it all together at the end of the drive.

[OmbooHankvald]

Originally Posted by Peter Nelson

If as you suspect windows is trying to do chkdsk on startup, is your hard drive LED flashing activity during the black screen or does it go out and disk access stops?

The LED is flashing and makes some activity noise, so I guess it is working on something... But when I left it a couple of hours chkdsk'ing (or whatever it was doing) on its own, when I came back it had entered SUSE? My guess is that it had rebooted for some reason and then the GRUB boot-screen timer had run out and chosen SUSE instead of Windows to start up

Originally Posted by Peter Nelson

Its good that at least your windows files are still there and visible from linux mountpoint.

Yes. I'm thinking of just getting the most important files to safety and then deleting the whole crap, but if we can sort it out the peaceful way then that would be better indeed.

Originally Posted by Peter Nelson

You may be able to view the (hidden, system) file BOOT.INI or others of windows, by examing the windows partition using linux text editor etc. That may tell you how far it gets through startup processing.

Yes. I have it here. The contents of BOOT.INI are:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn /noguiboot

Originally Posted by Peter Nelson

Personally I would try to sort one problem at a time so recover the windows before resizing partitions might be sensible.

Yes. Let's forget about resizing for now. It was just that I need a text editor badly and I figured that if the Windows-trouble was going to take a long time, I might as well just make myself comfortable with Linux (i.e. get OpenOffice - I need the .doc feature)

[OmbooHankvald]

Okay... I am extremely confused right now..

I started Windows and let the 'crunching' begin this morning. When I came back it was in SUSE. However, when I rebooted and chose Windows again Windows came forth!

Right now I'm in Windows and I don't understand anything of what happened. I just hope it'll continue like this.

Now, providing this keeps working, how do I resize? I'm going to defrag my Windows partition now.

OH

[ColdFury]

Use the ntfsprogs package to resize your NTFS partition in Linux.

http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html