[CentOS] confidence in partitioning tool (6.2)

Tue Jan 31 02:32:53 UTC 2012
Yves Bellefeuille <yan at storm.ca>

On Monday 30 January 2012, Larry Martell <larry.martell at gmail.com> 
wrote:

> I have a Windows 7 laptop that I want to make dual boot with CentOS
> 6.2. My plan was to use the Windows Disk Management tool to partition
> the disk, but I do not have the needed admin rights on the box to use
> that. Has anyone used the partitioning tool that comes with 6.2 to do
> this? Can I have some level of confidence that it will not mess
>  things up so that I cannot boot into Windows? if it screws up and
>  makes Windows unbootable that would be a Very Bad Thing.

I use System Rescue CD, http://www.sysresccd.org/ , for this task.

Before starting, use Windows's defragmenter, as Mark suggested. I 
suggest preparing a Windows system repair disk,  
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Create-a-system-repair-disc 
, if you can; if not, I suggest getting Hiren's Boot CD, 
http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/ , even though I'm not convinced 
that all the programs on the CD can be freely redistributed.

Then boot from the System Rescue CD, start X, and use GParted to resize 
the Windows partition, making it smaller and creating free space for 
CentOS. Then reboot from the CentOS installation DVD, making sure to 
create a custom partition layout so as to create a new Linux partition 
in the space you freed up.

-- 
Yves Bellefeuille <yan at storm.ca>
"La Esperanta Civito ne rifuzas anticipe la kunlaboron de erarintoj, se
ili konscias pri sia eraro." -- Heroldo Komunikas, n-ro 473.