replacing Windows

[Eberhard Roloff]

Matthew Flaschen wrote:
> Jared Greenwald wrote:
>> Someone gave me one of their old computers.  The thing still has some
>> data on it.  I've made a backup of the data to my raid, but in case
>> they remember about some obscure file they saved somewhere, I wanted
>> to try to save the Windows area as an accessible partition on whatever
>> new install I perform.
> 
> Use GParted (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php) to shrink the
> Windows partition as well as to create two new partitions, an ext3
> (holds the OS and data) and Linux swap partition (virtual memory).  Set
> the swap size to twice the RAM, make the Windows (NTFS) as small as
> possible, then allocate the rest of the space to ext3.  Then, when you
> install Ubuntu be sure /not/ to reformat, and to use the existing ext3
> and swap.
> 
> Matt Flaschen
> 
Another option might be to use partimage from a Linux bootCD and image 
the windows partion to a small, gzip(ped) or bzip(ped) image file 
somewhere on your disks.

Then, should the worst come to the worst, you can always put the image 
back.

For this you either need a harddisk or aharddisk partition of the 
required size, or even better, you use a virtual machine.

I use virtualbox for this. Doing it like this, you do not need to play 
around with partitions. Instead a virtual harddisk (i.e. a file) will 
do. I would not expect the forced-to-Virtual-boxed windows to start up, 
but you simply boot the virtual machine from a Linux boot CD and then 
you access any file(s) on the windows drive, just as it were "real". ;-)

Kind regards
Eberhard