No bios password - no spare partition - Howto install FC6?

[Charles Curley]

On Wed, Dec 06, 2006 at 03:24:44PM +0000, Alastair McKinley wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I am currently running FC4 on my T43 laptop.  I really want to upgrade
> to FC6, however I have a couple of problems.  Firstly, I dont have the
> Bios password to boot a CD, my sysadmin has it, and if I want him to
> do it I will have to wait some considerable time, and I want to
> install it myself anyway!

I take it this is a Lenovo/IBM Thinkpad. If so, you may find some
useful advice on http://www.thinkwiki.org.

> 
> Secdonly, I have no free space on my disk.  I have a 40G winxp
> partition which I rarely use, I normally boot xp under vmplayer.  This
> partition has 31G free on it, does anyone know if partition magic or
> some other tool can shrink an ntfs partition on the fly? (Remember no
> bios password!)

Assuming you solve the password problem, see
http://www.charlescurley.com/Lenovo.R51.html for how I did it, and
some other resources.

> Will 25G or so be enough for a full FC6 install?

Yes; plenty. See the release notes.

> I keep most of my data on an external drive so that doesnt matter
> too much.
> 
> So what I think I want is to leave my FC4 partition as it is, shrink
> my xp partition and install FC^ in the free space, how does that
> sound?  Will my current grub setup be able to boot FC6 ok?

Yes. Be sure that you install grub from one and only one Linux system
at a time, or else see to it that you keep the two grub.confs
coherent.

> 
> Heres my partition table:
> 
> Disk geometry for /dev/sda: 0.000-76319.085 megabytes
> Disk label type: msdos
> Minor    Start       End     Type      Filesystem  Flags
> 1          0.031  40967.226  primary   ntfs        boot
> 3      40967.227  51214.570  primary   fat32       lba
> 4      51214.570  72270.351  extended              lba
> 5      51214.601  52499.179  logical
> 6      52499.210  72270.351  logical   ext3
> 2      72270.352  76316.132  primary   fat32

Yup, looks like a Lenovo hard drive layout to me. But why is it
showing up as sda instead of hda?

-- 

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