Remove XP from XP-first Dual-boot?

[Fred]

Tony,

I am a little under the weather right now, but if you don't get the answers you need in the next couple of days, I'll be happy to help you get it like you want it.

It will be 2 or 3 more days before I can help you though.

Fred

[Lantesh]

Ok I know I'm not Fred, but I would like to help if I can. Here would be my plan of attack.

I would format hda1 to ext3 thereby wiping out Windows. It's already a good size at 11.7 gigs to be used for your main / partition for Mint. I would then shrink hda2 down to 1 gig and reformat it as your linux swap file, and expand hda3 three to the left to take over the resulting empty space. Now within hda3 expand hda6 all the way to the left to take up the new free space within hda3. This will increase the size of hda6, but will move the data to the left. After this is complete shrink hda6 down to whatever size you want it to be. You will now be taking away from the right. Keep it large enough that you can copy over anything you need from from hda7, to store temporarily in hda6. You now have some empty space between hda6 and hda7. Delete hda7, and create a new logical ext3 partition (your new storage partition) in it's place taking up all the resulting space. Lastly reinstall Mint to hda1, and designate hda6 as the home partition, being careful not to reformat hda6 in the process. You will have to reinstall your applications, but your settings have been preserved.

Ok after reading through this again to myself I'm thinking you might also want to put the swap inside hda3 as a logical partition, instead of leaving it outside as a primary. I suppose it really doesn't matter. The important thing is that you have it as far left as possible which is right next to to your Mint install. Your old setup had it all the way to the right, which is the inside and therefore the slowest part of the hard disk...not where you want your swap to be.

[MagnusB]

I might be mistaken, but isn't it hard to move "space" from a primary partition into a logical partition? It could be best to just backup the data you really need and create a new partition table, but I might be mistaken. And if Fred gets a chance to reply, he'll probably tell me on how many points I am wrong, after all, he is the resident partition expert

[Lantesh]

Lantesh, thanks for the answer, even if you're not Fred.
Wouldn't another side-effect of my having XP on hda1 / having used default install options be that my MBR is on hda1, which I'll be formatting?

Your welcome.

That doesn't matter because when you reinstall Mint to hda1 it will rewrite the MBR.

[Lantesh]

Anthony,

Well you need to get your swap info added back in. Here is what mine looks like. Obviously your swap's UUID, and location will be different.

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# /dev/sdb5
UUID=93997bf5-dbf7-463e-8c86-803c9b04b493 none            swap    sw              0       0

You will need to look up what all your UUID's have changed to, and correct all of your entries to reflect the new ones. Type this command in terminal to get them.

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ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid

Good luck, and let me know if I can be of more assistance.

[Lantesh]

Should I care that my NTFS data partition /dev/hda6 (formerly hda7) is only recognized when I leave it as /media/hda7 in fstab?

I don't know what to make of that one. That's very odd. We need Fred for this. Unfortunately he is recovering from an injury right now. I guess hang in there, and hit him up with this question after he gets back on his feet.

[Fred]

What you are seeing here is a name collision. The very thing that UUIDs were suppose to avoid. Unfortunately the UUID of an NTFS file system is not a unique character string. You can get the same UUID from two different NTFS partitions.

There are two ways to solve this problem. Use the legacy notation, ie. /dev/sdxx or use a partition label. I would suggest the label as the best alternative. You should have "ntfsprogs" already installed on your system. If not do so by typing in a terminal:

sudo aptitude install ntfsprogs

To assign a NTFS label, type in a terminal:

sudo ntfslabel /dev/sdxx newlabel

In you fstab change the UUID=some string to LABEL=Newlabel

That should fix the problem of fstab not knowing where the NTFS partition is.


You can change all your partitions over to label if you wish. Then you can say good-bye to UUID hell.

For an ext3 partition:

sudo e2label /dev/sdxx NewName

If NewName is left off, the command displays the current LABEL


For your swap partition you can set a label using mkswap,
but you need to turn swap off first:

sudo swapoff -a
sudo mkswap -L NewName /dev/sdxx
sudo swapon -a

Fred

[Lantesh]

Fred to the rescue. I hope you are feeling better. I didn't even think to tell Anthony about naming collisions, although you mentioned them to me once before. Hell I've even taken your advice and have all my storage partitions mounted using Labels, although some of my other partitions are still using UUIDs.