After successfully installing Linux Mint in dual-boot mode with Windows 7RC on my LG X110 netbook, and replacing the default Xandros EeePC Linux on my Asus Eee 701 netbook, I decided to add it to my HP notebook computer.
Normally I would leave this notebook on the shelf for emergency use only. The TX1200-series of touchscreen notebooks were poorly designed: they run hot, the fan is on most of the time, and they break down -- a lot, according to another dissatisfied TX user I met in an airport.
But I leave for my in-laws soon, and they live in rural Canada, which means the Internet connection is through a telephone wire -- and both my netbooks lack modems. I didn't really want the painful slowness of 7RC running on this TX, so I decided to add Linux Mint as a dual-boot install.
The key is to a dual-boot install is through the Computer Management dialog box, which I described in an earlier post. In Vista and 7, it is trivial to shrink the volume, making space for Linx on its own partition.
When when I ran the Shrink Volume command, Vista indicated that shrinkage was limited to 4GB, despite 80GB of free disk space. I used Defrag to clean up the drive, but this made matters worse! Now only 1.3GB were available. I ran ChkDsk, and the available space inched up to 1.7GB. I wanted a minimum of 10GB for Linux Mint.
Time to google. I found "Working Around Windows Vista’s "Shrink Volume" Inadequacy Problems" by The How-to Gekk and followed his steps in cleaning out problem files. I needed only to do these steps in order to create the 10GB partition I wanted:
- Run the Disk Cleanup Wizard.
- Disable System Restore
- Disable the pagefile.
- Change the Write debugging information drop-down to “None” to disable the kernel memory dump.
Read the entire Web page for full instructions.
PS: According to their own stats, Linux Mint is now the third most popular distribution of Linux.
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