Hi,

My wife has a Dell that she uses for her home-based business, and I'd like to slip a copy of 9.2(probably Discovery) on the HD without messing anything up! I've read all the disclaimers, caveats, and warnings about partitioning, and the need for a backup. I just wanted to make sure that people haven't been having serious issues with the Mandrake DiskDrake and installer. I'd rather do things slowly and get it right, insteading of making a mess that I have to clean up (and explain!).

I've read the docs and it *seems* pretty straightforward.

I'm probably going to go with Discovery since it has support for HSF software modems like mine...

Thanks!
Jason

"Measure twice, cut once...!"

Just run a defrag under XP and examine the last graphic after it ruins, it will give you an idea of how the files are laid out on the partition. The mandrake partitionmanager does NOT move files. If you shrink the partiion down past where files are stored, you simply loose them. AKA truncated. So depending on what you intend to do with parition manager and where XP decided to store files, who knows what you have to go through.

There may be some free utilities out there tht will consolidate files to the beginign of a partition, I have never had to do this myslef, but if you find you want to take have the partition for mandrake, and notice files are written up tot he last third of the XP partition, well... You'll either have to chance what files you will loose, settle for just 1/3 of the drive or find a way to consolidate those files. Well there is one more choice, back up data, wipe drive, partition appropriately, reinstall XP. install mandrake, but this is long and drawn out.

specially when it comes to wives...

no doubt!

i just backed up what i hope are all the essential files to DVD, in preparation for the big day(moment of truth?!)... if there is no trace of a change on the computer(except for a bootloader), there is less explaining to do!

i dread the thought that some key files get whacked during installation, and i'm trying to restore stuff like a madman! it is her business machine after all! for that reason i might put mandrake 9.1 PPC on my ibook, though i doubt the software modem will work, which is rather unfortunate!

-Jason

You could just buy another hard disk and install mandrake on that. That way. Nothing is affected.

Good point, extrasolar, but I am the epitome of 'cheapness!'

Jason,

My name is Jason too, and strangely enough, my wife runs a home-based business on a seperate pc... I desperately want to "convert" her to open source (I loathe microsoft).
Would you be interested in exchanging e-mails? You sound as if you're having the same kinds of issues I'm having, and I would love the opportunity to compare notes with someone that's in the same boat...

My e-mail address is firefoxx@bellsouth.net

You may want to avoid 9.2 and go right to 10.1 which has far better hardware support.

Start by ASSUMING that you MAY loose everything.

If you work based upon this assumption, you'll take proper precautions.

Then the defrag and reduce method is proported to work but I'd go with something else, such as Partition Magic or any other program that can resize a "hot" NTFS partition.