Partitioning Problems

[satsujinka]

did you try doing it manually?
though if you have xp on the whole drive your going to have to be tricky.
First:
copy any and all files with wpa in the title to a usb drive, external hard drive, sd card, or something of that nature (so you don't have to reactivate windows. It would also be wise to note where you foud them.)
Second:
Reinstall Windows XP with the size you want.
Third:
Put the wpa files back where you found them.
Fourth;
Install Daryna on the rest of the hard drive. You'll have to partition it manually (i also have an 80gb drive and it wouldn't find the rest of mine.)
At this point you may want to consider this:http://linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=90&t=11872
Or if you don't care to read all that, just make an ext3 partition and a swap partition (the swap only needs to exist you can make it as big or as small as you like depending on how much ram you have, in the other discussion 4 gb total swap and ram was recommended.)

[AK Dave]

You don't need to reinstall XP to do this. Or at least, I've never needed to do so. YMMV. But you won't get that XP partition to shrink unless you defrag it. A lot. The generic XP defrag utility sucks, hard, but it works - if you use it over and over again. What I had to do for the XP drive on my wife's computer at home was to go on a uninstall/delete spree, defrag the drive twice (once isn't good enough), boot the gparted liveCD and shrink the partition partially, reboot XP to run defrag twice more, and then gparted was able to shrink the partition to an "acceptable" size. Without the bloat, without the software overheard, on a smaller partition, XP boot time cut in half and her end-user interpretation was that it "was like getting a brand new computer" in term of speed boost and application response time. Bonus: lotsa room for linux install, and now the only reason she ever boots XP is to play GoPets.

My advice for the linux install is that AFTER performing the above delete/defragx2/gparted/defragx2/gparted sequence you use the gparted LiveCD (not gparted from Daryna installer) to setup your partitions. Then with Daryna LiveCD select "manual".

As always, YMMV and you're advised to perform a full backup before dinking with your partition table.

Oh, and I have the scars and marks to show for this: make sure that whatever media you use for your "full backup" is reliable enough to allow a "full restore". A backup that cannot be restored is no backup at all. NEVER TRUST A WESTERN DIGITAL MYBOOK!

A 10gb ext3 partition is more than sufficient for Daryna. Size your swap based on your available ram, but keep in mind that since your OS can't address more than 4gb of ram that swap+ram<=4gb is a good rule if ram>1gb, and swap=ram*2 if you have <=1gb ram. Partition the rest as ext3 and mount it as a seperate /home or just use it for media/music/video/doc storage.

[satsujinka]

I suppose you could do it that way.
I've always found it easier and faster to just reinstall xp.
but i have backups of everything and a usb drive full of the install files for my programs.
so yeah if you keep lots of important files on your xp or have a lot of extra programs resizing it may be faster.

[donec]

Oh, and I have the scars and marks to show for this: make sure that whatever media you use for your "full backup" is reliable enough to allow a "full restore". A backup that cannot be restored is no backup at all. NEVER TRUST A WESTERN DIGITAL MYBOOK!

Why do you say that I have only used one of those a couple of times and I returned them for a larger 2.5 inch drives, but I don't remember having any problems with the MyBooks?

[AK Dave]

Of course YMMV, but I've had nothing but problems. The classic was when I did a full backup on my laptop, a grueling process that WD's software choked on 8 times before getting it right. Just for grins, did a restore of the backup to make sure it would work. Ended up filling a 500gb drive with multiples of what should have been an 80gb backup. Scrubbed the drive for openSuSE and a fresh XP-Pro install, and then when it was time to restore the backup files to their rightful place the drive utterly failed. Dead. Kaput. Inaccessable. Some cheap $0.39 part on the IDE-to-USB controller on the drive took a vacation from reality, and the data was inaccessable. Options: return drive for full cash refund, or hack chassis to remove likely-still-functional drive and bridge it to another computer. A real geek would have chosen the second route. I chose the first, knowing that all of the critical files were already backed up somewhere else (mostly on my iPod Classic), and the rest were non-critical or could be recovered from another source or were irrelevant without XP in the first place.

Oh, and I have the scars and marks to show for this: make sure that whatever media you use for your "full backup" is reliable enough to allow a "full restore". A backup that cannot be restored is no backup at all. NEVER TRUST A WESTERN DIGITAL MYBOOK!

Why do you say that I have only used one of those a couple of times and I returned them for a larger 2.5 inch drives, but I don't remember having any problems with the MyBooks?