mpre wrote:I have a question whose answer i could not found. I have a 4 partitioned laptop (1 for linux, 1 for swapp, 1 for windows and 1 for data) I want to instal Isadora using the dis as it is. That means that i want to put the system in 1 partition and the data (/home?) in the other one (150g), maintaining the swapp and the windows ones. Also i would like that the data particion could also be accessed by windows. How can i manage to do so?
During the installation process, make sure you select the "Specify partitions manually (advanced)" option when it is time to partition your drive, and ensure that your current Linux partition is marked as "/" and that you make sure that the format checkbox beside it is checked. You do not have to do anything with your existing swap partition, since it should automatically be recognized by Mint.
As for the data partition, it completely depends on what filesystem that partition is formatted in. If you're using that partition for /home, I'd personally stick with a Linux filesystem, e.g. ext2/3/4, but the problem is that Windows does not recognize any Linux filesystems by default (afaik, it only recognizes NTFS and the old FAT filesystems). Here are some possible solutions for that:
http://www.howtoforge.com/access-linux- ... om-windows. On the other hand, you could just format it as NTFS, which both Windows and Mint recognizes, but since full featured access to NTFS in Linux is sort of an ongoing project, you may encounter issues...I haven't tried this before, so I don't know to be honest. What I prefer is to put all Linux partitions (/, /boot, /home, /swap) I have into an extended partition, and the Windows partitions in separate primary partitions.
Are you sure you don't have any other partitions though? Maybe some manufacturer recovery partitions? You always have to consider them when setting up your partitions correctly. Also, do make sure you make a full backup of your system before starting the partitioning and installation process. The chances that things could go wrong are slim, but still existant.
TacBeaver wrote:Then things went wrong : for some reason the installation wasn't limited to my external drive (my internal drive wasn't touched when I installed Mint 8 though!?), but also my internal drive was somehow impacted by this new installation of Mint 9. Probably only the MBR was affected, but due to the encryption of my disk, the pc was no longer able to startup the necessary decryption SW and therefore couldn't find the installed WinXP anymore (which I still need for my job).
So my questions
- did I do anything wrong ? I guess that next time I better unplug the internal HDD before I start installing. Or is there another solution ?
- we (IT dept and myself) tried to repair the damaged disk, but without success. At the end the company image file was restored and I could recover my data from a recent backup file. Did we overlook another solution ? Any suggestions ?
Well, since you've already restored a disk image, everything should be fine now...but make sure that in the future, you unplug all external devices and drives as a precautionary measure before installing Linux. You say the MBR was affected; I'm assuming that Mint installed Grub into the MBR of your internal drive, not your external one? That sometimes happens, unfortunately, if you skipped a very important step in the last step of the Ubiquity installer. Just above the "Install" button is an "Advanced..." button; clicking that will let you configure two things: 1) where Grub is installed (or whether or not it's installed), and 2) proxies. I'm guessing that you left the options at their default values, or forgot completely about them, heh. By default, Grub installs itself to /dev/sda, so if /dev/sda refers to your internal drive, that's what caused the problem.
TacBeaver wrote:a last question which doesn't really belong here, but which is linked to my disaster recovery plan that I explained before : I'm still looking for a way to read the copied PST-files (as we are using Outlook 2003 in the office) with a linux application. This would complete my disaster recovery plan. Today this part is still missing. Is there a way to read those PST files ? or to convert them into a format readable by Thunderbird or a similar program ?
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Import_.pst_files