System Commander 7 not working - any pure Linux alternatives?

[Rick Stevens]

Mark Knecht wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-03-29 at 10:24, Rick Stevens wrote:
> 
> 
>>That's odd.  I was able to resize my laptop using SC7.01.
> 
> 
> I started by installing 7.04. I'm now using the 7.05 update. 
> 
> It's not that it won't resize the partition. I never get to the screen
> that shows the partitions. It just sits with the message about analyzing
> my system. It won't do a second OS install either. Sits with the same
> message.

Hmmm.  Weird.

> I have a suspicion that it may be chipset related. I booted Dyne:bolic
> and using lspci I see an ATI chipset - north bridge, south bridge,
> pretty much the whole machine except the networking (both wired and
> wireless) and 1394, are ATI. Probably there's some weird little glitch
> recognizing the EIDE controllers or something...

Uh, that's possible but it does show the partitions, doesn't it?  If it
does, I think it can at least _see_ the controller and drive.

>>No.  There is no linux utility that will resize an NTFS partition.  NTFS
>>is supported via a kernel module just like NFS or any other filesystem, 
>>but the "write" versions of the module can hose NTFS to a point that not
>>even Winblows can recover it.
> 
> 
> As I thought. Thus, I could blow the whole machine away, do a Linux
> install first, keeping partition 1 for XP, then install XP and just live
> with the primary partition I suppose. No reason I can't make a FAT32
> partition using Linux and share that between Linux and XP I suppose.
> 
> It's nice that Linux is so flexible...

Remember that XP will try to blow Linux away.  At the very least it'll
kill off grub or lilo.  Your best bet is to install XP first and reserve
space for the Linux shared partitions..  Then install Linux and let grub
do your OS loading for you.  grub will see XP and put it in the boot
menu.

>>SC7.01 resized my NTFS just fine.  Partition Commander 8 should also do
>>a bang-up job.  You may need to simply reinstall SC7.01 to get it to
>>work or boot off the floppies or CD rather than the hard disk to get it
>>to work (NTFS can do some weird things).
> 
> 
> I sent a tech support message to V-Com this morning. If I can engage
> them in a conversation I'll find out about Partition Commander 8
> handling this. 

I've never called V-Com so I don't know how responsive they'll be.  Good
luck with them.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-          Consciousness: that annoying time between naps.           -
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