transplanting....

[calvin166]

ok i am slowly dipping into linux and have had a few problems...

first, i tried installing red hat 8 and that screwed my harddrive over... so i gave up(:() then iwent back about a week ago to my comp. on it i have windows xp. i also have a second hd. i would like to take a hard drive from a comp that has windows me(root of all evil) and partion it. all i want to keep from the windows me install is the files.i would back it up onto a cdr and then throw them on my other hard drive but i dont currently have a enough cdrs to fill up 10 Gb of files. so now my question... can i take a hard drive with an operating system on it, put it in another computer as a slave hard drive and the partion it and put a linux distro on the second partion of the slave.

[hard candy]

Any way you could hook the computers up- LAN, null modem cable, email- and send the files you want to save to a directory in the WinXP partition. Then you could partition, format, and install on the hard drive without worrying about the data being lost.

[Icarus]

If I read that right, your primary drive has WinXP and you want to slave another drive that has WinME, but WinME has been partitioned to use the whole driver. There is space available but it has been allocated to a single partition?

If you use Mandrake 9.1 disk 1, they have an excellent partitioning tool that you can use to resize partitions (even NTFS) and once that is done you can reboot off the Red Hat disks and install from there (that's exactly what I did with my laptop)

[calvin166]

ya im planning on repartioning the win ME disk into 2 partions, which i believe is FAT32 file system. but i can use one os to repartion, and another to install?

[Icarus]

Yes, I think Mandrake 9.1 uses a GUI version of 'parted', but it's easy enough to boot from the MDK disk, resize the partition then reboot and use the OS you want to install ;)

The GUI is very well done with nice charts and easy interface.