Fedora 2 on a Presario 2100 Laptop?

[maaddr-fedora at yahoo.com]

--- John Cox & Christine Armond <pkands108 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 
> --- Olwe Melwasul <olwe at cpinternet.com> wrote:
> 
> > Anybody have experience putting Fedora 2 on a Presario 2100
> laptop? I
> > 
> > found a link at http://clevershark.com that talks about F1,
> but 
> > apparently there's different issues between 2.4 and 2.6. The
> first
> > big 
> > question is do I need to get Partition Magic to partition the
> drive 
> > (currently totally XPed--with weird Compaq proprietary stuff
> on it),
> > or 
> > can Fedora handle the repartitioning...or perhaps Mandrake
> 10, as I 
> > heard a rumor?
> > 
> > Olwe
> > 
> > 
> 
> I am dual-booting XP and FC2 on a 2100us.  The only problems
> I've had
> are 
> 1. with the mousepad --worked fine with FC1 but you will need
> to
> install the synaptics driver for FC2. I don't really use the
> pad so I
> didn't do that. 
> 2. If you connect via dialup you will need a driver. I bought
> the one
> from Linuxant.com for 15.00 USD. There is a free version out
> there
> somewhere.
> 
> 3. In order to get P.Magic to work I had to run chkdsk /f to
> fix some
> errors that PM objected to. I would recommend compacting the
> drive
> first with swap turned off and also turning off the recovery
> feature
> until after you change the partitions (XP defragmenter seems to
> do a
> better job that way). After chkdsk I had no problems with PM. 
> 
> Just a note: You won't be able to use your xp recovery disk
> after you
> change the partition (without wiping out Linux). And if you
> have to
> reinstall/recover using the xp system disk you will lose most
> of the
> free software like Norton's, WinDVD,etc. For me that is no
> problem.
> 
> Good Luck.
> 
> 

You can do a complete backup and then repartition the disk using
the SysRescueCD.  http://www.sysresccd.org/

I did that when I installed FC1 on my Compaq laptop.  Since I
don't have *any* Windows disks for it for I was very worried
about munging up the XP that was on it.

First run a complete defrag in Windows to move the empty space to
the end of the disk.

Then you simply boot on the SysRescueCD.  

I made several saves of the existing disk blocks using Partimage
to write the blocks using Samba to a windows share on another PC.
 I made the saved files a max size of 700MB so I could later burn
them to CD-R.

Then I used qt_parted from the SysRescueCD to resize the FAT32
partition to make room for Linux and Linux swap. 

Afterwards, the Windows partition was perfectly healthy - just
smaller when I was done.

If the Windows partition is NTFS you might have a different
story.  Parted can't resize a NTFS partition. 

I left mine as FAT32 so I could mount and write to it from
Fedora.

--Mike