Advice needed prior to hard drive install
Advice needed prior to hard drive install
I am currently running Windows 7 and i would like to install Precise Puppy alongside Windows 7. What i would like to know is, could i open up windows 7 and reduce the amount of disk space by about 10 or 20 GB and then create a new partition and swap partition and then carry on the install procedure? Thanks.
Puppy has a tool called Gparted for resizing and creating partitions. But do NOT use it to resize a Win7 partition! There have been reports that it will break Windows.
However, Win7 has a disk management tool that will safely shrink its own partition. Then you can boot off a Puppy CD and run Gparted to build some Linux partitions in the new empty space.
Your next issue will be to install a bootloader on the hard drive that can dual-boot your Win7 and Puppy. If you have no experience with this, I would suggest that you get an old machine to practice on. There is a chance that you could disable your Win7 setup if you make a mistake with the bootloader.
However, Win7 has a disk management tool that will safely shrink its own partition. Then you can boot off a Puppy CD and run Gparted to build some Linux partitions in the new empty space.
Your next issue will be to install a bootloader on the hard drive that can dual-boot your Win7 and Puppy. If you have no experience with this, I would suggest that you get an old machine to practice on. There is a chance that you could disable your Win7 setup if you make a mistake with the bootloader.
Re: Advice needed prior to hard drive install
You can shrink Win 7 from within Win 7 itself.old-user wrote:I am currently running Windows 7 and i would like to install Precise Puppy alongside Windows 7. What i would like to know is, could i open up windows 7 and reduce the amount of disk space by about 10 or 20 GB and then create a new partition and swap partition and then carry on the install procedure? Thanks.
Defragment and make backup first.
I've used Gparted to shrink Win 7 a few times, but care
must be taken to first defragment Win, and right after
shrinking, boot Win so it runs checkdisk.
This is risky and I wouldn't have done it without a repair
disk and backup image.
Inspiron 700m, Pent.M 1.6Ghz, 1Gb ram.
Msi Wind U100, N270 1.6>2.0Ghz, 1.5Gb ram.
Eeepc 8g 701, 900Mhz, 1Gb ram.
Full installs