How well does Vista shrink?

***Dan*** · #1 21st April 2009, 10:08 PM

My old AMD Athlon XP 32 bit desktop box has spent the last three weeks telling me (in no uncertain terms) that it would like to retire now. After the shock of being thusly abandoned by what I thought was a trusty friend, I figured out I'm pretty much game with the whole idea too, as long as it's a good opportunity to get a nice laptop/desktop replacement.

However, due to the ever-pervasive Microsoft® tax, the new one is probably going to have (shudder!) Vista® on it. <..

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And that just isn't gonna cut it! So for warranty purposes, Vista® must remain for a short while. And, I'll admit right here, that I fully intend to boot into it (Vista®) and have a long hard look around. But after that odious chore is out of the way, I need to shrink the Vista partition and install F10~F11. (Dunno which yet.)

The problem here is, the last time I tried to shrink an XP partition ... It shrank ok, but I successfully killed it too. All the data was still there, but no matter what I tried, it would no longer boot. Natch, the owner didn't have the back-up disks ... so no re-install was possible. (I've long since chucked my old XP® disks into a burning trash barrel.) The old XP install was mostly owner-borked already, and booted into bluescreen more often than not anyway, so I parked F9 on the empty space, cleaned up grub to only casually mention the continued existance of the Microsoft minion®, updated it with all the goodies she could ever want, and sent it home with a "have a nice life" note. (It was my sister-in-law's machine, and she not only doesn't contact me for free tech support anymore, but no longer speaks to me period, so I consider the whole affair a bit of a raging success.) <..

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So ... The question of the day is ... I'm wondering what your experiences have been with stuffing Vista into a broom closet?

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stefan1975 · #2 21st April 2009, 10:17 PM

well my Dell precision came with Vista_x64 Ultimate (yes ultimate, jay! for the ultimate extras) preinstalled on it and I effectively shrank it back 100% by formatting it with ext4 for fedora. Should anything happen to the laptop my accountmanager will take it back any which way but Dell also provided a Vista recovery DVD that I can use to reinstall it factory default should the need arise....

so my experiences with ditching vista are pretty much great .... it is as gone as it ever can be and any hardware supplier not fulfilling their warrantee because of an operating system has some major issues with me (not that they'd be scared of that ... but still).

stefan

SomeDamFool · #3 21st April 2009, 10:50 PM

I got a new laptop a month ago with a 250 gig drive and Vista pre-installed. When I installed F10 I used Anaconda to shrink Vista to a 50 gig partition, and Fedora is on the rest. It worked with no problems, and in the past I have done the same with an XP partition.

In both cases though I really didn't care if Windows died during the process, so there was no stress involved.
Mike

***glennzo*** · #4 21st April 2009, 10:58 PM

Good experiance with my laptop too Dan. Toshiba (2 years old now) with a 160GB disk. In my case, I used Vista Disk Tools to shrink the Vista partition and created 3 empty partitions in the free space, one for swap and 2 for Linux. I've since installed Fedora 10 and Fedora 11. I've had many other Linux variants on this 2nd ext3 partition. Formatting of the partitions was done during the installs. Additionally, I've moved things around to squeeze in XP too. Again, no troubles. I'd say go for it, but take the time to make some system restore disks. Shhhh. It happens.

***Dan*** · #5 22nd April 2009, 05:07 AM

Ok. That makes me feel better about it. It really wouldn't be a great loss if Vista® borks, but I'd just as soon keep it around until the warranty runs out, or the machine has paid for replacing itself in the budget.

I guess it's just my typical luck, but all of my own machines that I shrank XP on continued to boot and run fine on XP. (until I finally killed that partition entirely) But the first time I tried it on the machine of a PITA relative ... it failed. <..

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JohnBailey · #6 22nd April 2009, 06:42 AM

You could always go for an unbranded custom built box. The prices are usually fairly similar, and you can specify exactly what you want installed, or better yet, build it yourself.

I've had the same computer for over 15 years.

Many new cases, drives, motherboards, memory, graphics cards etc.. But each upgrade cost me far less than a new PC, and disposing of the old one.

#7 22nd April 2009, 07:17 AM

Dan

if you everr want Vista ultimate 32bit an 64bit let me know an i'll ship it to you for nothing

stefan1975 · #8 22nd April 2009, 08:09 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Demz

Dan

if you everr want Vista ultimate 32bit an 64bit let me know an i'll ship it to you for nothing

are you that one person who has an retail non-OEM version of windows vista ultimate? I heard they just sold one or two of those $600 box-kits......

***Dangermouse*** · #9 22nd April 2009, 09:15 AM

Hi Dan,

ive always had a good experience with vista shrink, done it many times (shrink vista

), never had a problem, however i have always made a ghost back up first of vista, works well but you need the vista disk to repair boot, if you restore it.

John the train · #10 22nd April 2009, 09:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JohnBailey

You could always go for an unbranded custom built box. The prices are usually fairly similar, and you can specify exactly what you want installed, or better yet, build it yourself.

I've had the same computer for over 15 years.

Many new cases, drives, motherboards, memory, graphics cards etc.. But each upgrade cost me far less than a new PC, and disposing of the old one.

Worth thinking about.. My #2 desktop only cost about £130, it's a bit basic in one or two areas - 1GB RAM, Sempron processor - but has built in stretch, up to 4GB RAM and any AM2 CPU I care to throw about it. Besides, Linux isn't a resource hog like M$.

***Dan*** · #11 22nd April 2009, 10:22 AM

Good question, JohnBaily. I guess a few facts are in order.

The old beast:
AMD Athlon XP 3200+
MSI K7N2GM2 Motherboard (Socket A)
nVIDIA® nForce2 IGP Chipset
RAM 2048
EVGA e-GeForce FX 5200 Graphics card 128Mb DDR - 8x/4x
3com 3c905C -TX/TX-M "Tornado" 1-/100 NIC
Yamaha YMF724F [DS-1 Audio Controller]
(2) LITE-ON DVDRW SHM-165P6S
(1) 250G Hitachi EIDE PATA HDD
(1) 500G Maxtor EIDE PATA HDD
(1) Atech PRO-28U All-in-One Internal/External Card Reader

Needless to say, it's not exactly the strongest dinosaur in the barn and getting a (new) replacement motherboard is unlikely. Having owned two of them disinclines me to try.

The nature of the failures I'm seeing tend to make me think the problem is either in the HDD or the motherboard and BIOS. Having had similar strings of failures in two HDDs in the last six months, and some sporadic and cryptic HDD read failures on cold boot up makes me lean toward the mobo/BIOS.

Add to that the fact that when I was done fixing stuff ... I'd still be left with a really nifty fixed up 32 bit ... dinosaur.

So that means essentially I'm replacing everything from the PSU out. When I crunched the numbers for some decent components, I was getting within a couple of hundred bucks of a decent laptop, and this old beast has reached it's own evolutionary dead end.

Sooooo, given all that ... this didn't seem like such a bad idea.