Installing Ubuntu

[David Vincent]

Nils Kassube wrote:
> Some months ago I followed that procedure on 2 Windows XP machines and on 
> both the Windows partition was damaged without hope for Windows to 
> recover. Of course it was damaged by resizing the partition with gparted 
> afterwards, not due to defragmenting. When that happened, I did some 
> research and found a forum entry somewhere which claimed that you should 
> NOT defragment an NTFS partition before installing Linux (sorry, can't 
> find that entry right now). As I did not yet try without defragmenting, I 
> don't know if that would work any better (there are not many Windows 
> machines around to play with :) but I do know that defragmenting doesn't 
> prevent data loss.

i would love to read that forum entry.  i've resized hundreds of disks 
with all the tools available (gparted, qtparted, partition magic and 
more though generally pm or gparted) and almost always defragmented them 
before doing so.  i've never had a problem unless there was a hardware 
issue with the drive (sometimes resizing the partition brings out those 
issues) or a power issue during the process.  defragmenting the drive 
(if you are shrinking it) will save you time during the shrink process.

> So I think, the most important thing to do is backup all your data before 
> doing anything to the Windows partition. And be prepared to reinstall 
> Windows (if you really want to keep it).

no argument there.  i would suggest this course of action...

1.  backup your stuff
2.  chkdsk/fdisk the windows partition(s)
3.  defrag your iwndows partition
4.  resize with your favorite tool (which will also do filesystem checks 
in the process if the tool is competent)
5.  now install linux in the freed space

-d