alexpgp | Background processing...

Recent studies say that multitasking is not the way to go, and there is probably something to that. Yesterday, in the middle of trying to achieve closure on the OCR portion of the current job, I was completing a backup of the contents of my previous VAIO, which in its day went by the name of proust, a worthy successor to yet another VAIO, ellroy.

My trusty proust had, like Humpty Dumpty, suffered a great fall literally on the eve of a trip to Baikonur, giving me a mandate to immediately go and buy its replacement, webster, which still performs yeoman duty as my day-to-day computer. At the time, it wasn't clear what in the damaged VAIO worked and what didn't, but having the unit around later gave me the confidence to risk junking the hidden 5-GB "recovery" partition to use the freed real estate to install Ubunu Linux.

One of the things I had done with proust upon taking it out of the box was to partition the hard disk so that there would be a C: drive for the system and program installation files, and a D: drive for data. Unfortunately, my seat-of-the-pants partition resulted in a chronic space problem on the C: drive that always stuck in my craw.

While I was doing the backup, I decided that what really needed to happen to bring proust back into the ranks of usable machines was the following:

delete the deadwood files

resize D to make it smaller, and move it "away" from C

resize C to make it larger

leave something left over for a new Linux partition, because the old system was stifling in its 5-GB hovel

What I learned in the process, carried out on my way in and out the door to my office, was this:

Partition Magic 8.0 doesn't grok Linux partitions

Gparted does

the Knoppix LiveCD apparently activates any Linux swap partition it finds on a hard disk

you must deactivate active Linux swap partitions inside of extended partitions before you'll be allowed to do anything with said partitions

you can't move a resized D it if it is enclosed in an extended partition

extended partitions don't move

grub is actually easy to use

UUIDs are a good thing to know about when dealing with grub and fstab

So what I now have is a machine whose hard disk is about equally divided between Windows XP and Linux, with the /usr partition mounted on the smaller ext3 Linux partition, and the rest of the directories in the new ext3 partition. After restoring the D files to the newly created and formatted extended partition, everything seems to work.

Now I just have to hope that the keyboard doesn't fall apart. :^)

Cheers...