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Topic: Frugal install, cfdisk and partitioning

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slick204

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Posts: 9
Joined: July 2007

Posted: July 18 2007,17:50

I've been trying out DSL live CD on my old laptop (Pentium MMX, 133MHz, 32 M RAM, 2 G HDD). I would like to do a frugal install and keep the existing Win 98SE (for now). I'm unclear if cfdisk can use the empty space on the hard drive to make new linux partitions without disrupting the existing data. I found a post that said it would work and another that said it would wipe the whole drive. Does anyone have a definite answer?

Also, any suggestions on partition sizes for the DSL, home and swap partitions? I have around 1 Gb I can use.

Thanks!

curaga

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Joined: Feb. 2007

Posted: July 18 2007,18:17

cfdisk cannot resize partitions.. Do you mean it's one drive with free space, or one partition and unpartitioned space?

If it all is in one partition, first defrag your windows drive, to gain continuous space. Then you can resize it non-destructively with parted (in mydsl/apps)

After that you can use cfdisk to make the partitions into that empty space, format 'em and install DSL..

With your ram I'd recommend 96mb swap. Total of 128 is enough for not running out of memory, normally..
DSL frugal needs 50mb space, but formatting takes some, so make DSL partition ~57mb. And the rest free space for persistent home..

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slick204

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Posts: 9
Joined: July 2007

Posted: July 18 2007,20:29

Quote (curaga @ July 18 2007,13:17)

It's one drive with one partition (the whole drive).
I just cleaned out and defraged the drive, so it should be ready.
Parted looks like the tool to resize the existing partition (they talk about it in their FAQ).
I hope to have time tonight to give it a try.

Thank you for your help!

^thehatsrule^ Offline

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Posts: 3275
Joined: July 2006

Posted: July 18 2007,21:40

parted docs seem to indicate it is capable of resizing without defragging...

but I guess there's no harm in doing it anyways (though I guess you'd need a special option to move everything to one side).

slick204

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Posts: 9
Joined: July 2007

Posted: July 20 2007,03:06

OK, I guess I'm going to need some more help.
To get myDSL extensions like parted I assume I have to be connected to the internet, or are some of them on the CD?
That leads to another problem: I can't get any of my three wireless cards to work. The one that should work is a Linksys WPC11, version 3. I've tried the Prism 2 configuration tool and it fails to connect. Someone suggested unloading the orinoco and hermes modules (I see them listed during boot up) but I get "Device or resource busy" when I try.
I also tried adding a couple of boot codes that were suggested: nohdcp and pci=assign_busses. I'm not sure if I did this correctly though. My boot options looked like this:
fb800x600 lowram dsl nohdcp pci=assign_busses

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

9 replies since July 18 2007,17:50

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