Re: [gentoo-user] Re: amd64 installation: which file system?

[Mick]

On Wednesday 19 July 2006 05:31, James wrote:

> Yes HP is one of them. Purchased the system through Office Depot.
> Will not make this mistake again.

In the UK at least HP sell refurbished and slightly obsolete components with 
one year warranty on ebay.  If you bid when the footy, Wimbledon, etc., is on 
the telly you can get a pretty descent box for a relatively low price.  Of 
course, there's morons who keep outbidding themselves and push up prices for 
everyone else . . . but even so it's worth looking into it.  Buying HP_Compaq 
from a shop is an absolute no-no, unless they're throwing the darn things 
out.  It occasionally happens, but not that often.  Unfortunately, with a low 
price comes the 'compaqified' installation image.  The best solution that I 
have found is to shrink the partition with gparted *before* the machine is 
ever booted up and image this smaller partition onto a DVD - should you ever 
want to resell the computer.

>
> > If these are new systems, I would give HP support a call and demand
> > they send you the WinXP OEM installation CD.

They will.  But at a price (not much) and guess what, it is an image of the 
original installation which as far as I recall requires the whole of the disk 
for it to be installed again!  Can you believe them!

> After blowing away the NTFS (XP) stuff via reformatting. I'm going to
> see if I can install/restore XP from the backup partition to
> the newly reduced 30Meg partition.

Surprise me if this works
> If HP forces me to choose between gentoo and XP, by_by XP.

>
> Yes I know the 10.6 gig of XP will fit, what I was looking for
> is an opinion on blowing away the orginal XP on the 85 gig partition,
> reformatting with several new partitions for Gentoo and XP and using
> the XP restore from the 9 gig partition as the end of the drive, where
> the HP-XP restore software is located.

Surprise me again for the reasons mentioned above.  I believe that it will 
either overwrite the partitions you've created or bomb out with an error.

> If nobody posts a better idea by tomorrow morning, it's by by XP.....

I have been successful with a number of 32bit HP-Compaq machines by doing the 
following:

Boot into WinXP and uninstall all system software and applications (e.g. 
Windoze IM, Outlook Express, etc.) that you do not need.  Refrag the machine 
using the native defrag application from the Administrative Tools.  Reboot 
<--> defrag.  Repeat the cycle of rebooting and defragging a couple more 
times until there is no discernible fragmentation.  Use gparted to resize the 
partition and create new as required.  So far I had no failures, although on 
some older machines with low memory the shrinking can take absolute ages (it 
doesn't fail, just takes forever).

> > >  Is there any free download software (even if it's a binary) to
> > > defrag this ntfs partition, for an amd64 ? Googling for
> > > {O&ODefrag +amd64 } does not produce anything useful.

Please forgive me if I have missed a critical point in this thread - why does 
it have to be 64bit?  Won't the WinXP 32bit defrag tool do the job?
-- 
Regards,
Mick