[KLUG Members] Multiple OS Installation on Thinkpad laptop

[Sanjay Chigurupati]

Hi,
I made a mistake there. That should have been refund, not rebate. I had
read on the web somewhere that if u dint use the pre-installed windows, u
could set up linux and return the windows copy and ask for a refund. Not
sure if its valid.

Coming back to what I am trying to do:
 I had a 40 gb hard disk and bought 80 GB one to make space for Linux
install.

 1) I am trying to transfer the XP pro software to the new hard disk and
also move the utility/diagnostics software from IBM as well as some nice CD
burning software. There is a hidden diagnostics partition on the laptop
hard disk and when I tried to recover to the new hard disk, it gave an
error about a partition.

 2) The XP Partition has lot of free space and I would like to use the
minimum required on the new hard disk, with allowance for virtual memory
and use the rest for other OS. Once the new hard disk is ready, I will
format the old one and use it as a portable usb drive.

 3) For the diagnostic software, it looks I will need a 12 GB partition (
XP OS) and a 4-5 GB partition (hidden) for diagnostics. Not sure if I can
put both or either of them in an extended partition.

 4) About OS Install, I thought I would install fedora , suse, gentoo and
debian using extended partitions. just started using suse. used a bit of
debian and need to work on gentoo.

    I had a desktop with 2 hard disks with which I wanted to try, but dad
needed it. So I am tryin with the laptop.

   Multi-booting: have used gag bootloader to boot win xp pro, debian and
redhat.

  not tried gag with bsd though.

 5) About BSD: am interested in free bsd and to c how different it is from
Linux.  Open BSD: heard the install is very daunting and wanted to give it
a shot.

 6) Abt laptop, I have IBM R51 with ati radeon 7500 mobility. not sure if
it has 3d acceleration. its workin fine with suse 9.2 prof. not sure if the
internal 56 k modem is winmodem and whether it will work with linux (need
to check the net). not tested network features.

 Thanks for all the help. I also heard of a cloning software (freeware)
called save part which is supposed to help in disk replication.

Thanks,
Sanjay


______________________________________________________________________