Am I insane?: Dual Boot/XP Pro (both)/ move to a smaller drive/ FREE!?

July 5, 2009 5:59 PM

Am I insane?: Dual Boot/XP Pro (both)/ move to a smaller drive/ FREE!?

What I would like to do is this:
I have a drive that has two partitions. First partition is already formatted, runs XP Pro, is full of all kinds of stuff I do, and is all set up correctly. I also have another XP Pro image (driveXML) which I want to use for games. It only has the OS and the games installed so its lean and mean. What I want to do is:
1) on startup have a prompt to pick which system to use (defaulting to the first partition)
2) whichever one I choose, have that become the c: drive

Yes, I know about the boot.ini file but every example I see has it working with two different OSs. I also read something about doing this will cause the system to work very slowly if at all so let me know if this is the case. Will it not work with defragging anymore? Also, I don't care if I see the unused partition in My Computer or not.

To further complicate matters, the driveXML image came from an 80 gb drive but it didn't use anywhere near that ammount of space. How can I transfer that image to a smaller space (like 36 gb) ?

Oh yes, FREE utilities would be GREAT.

posted by CodeMonkey to computers & internet (4 comments total)

You can use the boot.ini file to boot two versions of XP on different partitions or disks. You will need to edit with the new partition number. Here is a sample of a dual boot.ini with xp on two partitions.
posted by Climber at 7:21 PM on July 5

As a linux fanboi, I'd be inclined to set up an XP/Ubuntu/XP triple boot, using GRUB to handle boot loader selection, and ntfsresize to tweak my oversized disk image before copying it to its new home with ddrescue. But it takes a fair while to become familiar enough with all these tools to use them safely. If you're new to this kind of caper, read this before you start.
posted by flabdablet at 7:26 PM on July 5

Elaborating on what flabdablet said, gparted, the gnu partition editor, is a nice graphical interface to ntfsresize (among other things). You can run this by booting from the latest Ubuntu live cd.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 8:28 PM on July 5

Because the filesystem that needs shrinking is inside an image file, it would need to be resized before being copied out to a partition, and I don't believe gparted will do that. The command line tools, on the other hand, can do it easily:

cp /path/to/image.dat /path/to/resized.dat
ntfsresize --size 36G /path/to/resized.dat

after which you could copy the resized filesystem to its final destination with

sudo ntfsclone --overwrite /dev/sdaX /path/to/resized.dat

But you really do need to be comfortable with the bash command line and with Linux device naming conventions to use these things safely.
posted by flabdablet at 9:17 PM on July 5