On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 12:45 PM, Jonathan Nilsson <jnilsson at uci.edu> wrote: >> > do they all run with dual-booting Windows/CentOS systems? is their >> > environment filled with laptops running CentOS? >> >> This is a new system, but yes, it will be deployed on laptops running >> CentOS. >> > > ah, ok. so you need to get centos working on the bare-metal hardware of the > laptop. VMs will not help you there ;) > > I didn't come here to debate VM's. I was just looking for someone to >> say "Yeah, I used the CentOS partitioning it and it worked like a >> charm" or "I used it and it was a disaster." >> > > sorry if i sounded cross; i am not trying to be argumentative. No problem. The discussion was just veering away from what I was trying get out of it. > it's just > that from my experience dual-booting has not been worth the effort unless > it is truly needed for the hardware performance, and running CentOS on a > laptop (depending on the model) may prove challenging to get all the > hardware to work. > > as for partitioning, i have not had success using any linux installer to > resize an existing Windows partition. supposedly gparted on a livecd can do > this (though it has not worked for me when i tried it, possibly because i > didn't defrag windows first): > http://www.micahcarrick.com/resize-ntfs-partition.html > > the most reliable method for us has been to pre-partition the drive into at > least 2 partitions, then install windows into the first partition, then > install centos (letting it use the free space to auto-create partitions for > /boot and LVM, and correctly set up grub in the MBR.) I can't install Windows - I don't have the disks, and this is a corporate install with all sorts of their own stuff. So my plan is to defrag as Mark suggested, use clonezilla as Les suggested, and back up the MBR as Ljubomir suggested, then give it go with the CentOS partitioning tool. Thanks much everyone for the help! I'll let you know how it goes. -larry