On Tuesday, 20 November 2007, Nicolas Thierry-Mieg Nicolas.Thierry-Mieg@imag.fr wrote: <snip>

I think it's been mentioned in the thread, but since you don't talk about this in your summary above: one thing I would recommend is create (at least) 2 partitions for MS: a small (5 to 10 G) for the system, and a larger one for data.

Nicholas: Our other boxes have four (4) partitions for Windows. I've never installed Windows on this box, because it came from the factory with WinXp in Spanish. I reduced the NTFS partition in size, to make room for CentOS, but it's still running what came on it, out of the Dell factory. Last week, I got an English language WinXP from Dell, so I'm ready to roll in English now and do it properly on this one too!

then use norton/symantec ghost to generate images of your system

Several of our boxes have had Removable EIDE drive units in them (made by CRU) and I used those, before I began using Linux, to make images, and that was a great thing to do. I got lazy about making the backups and found it easier to backup over the network. I didn't use Norton Ghost, I used something else, but as I write this, I can't recall the name of the Utility I used to make the images. As I recall, at that time (a few years ago), Norton was more difficult to use and I'd read something about some unreliable results from Ghost.

you can probably do this with linux tools as well if you don't want

to buy ghost.

Yes. I will do everything possible with Linux tools in the future. Thank you! Lanny