Linux Install on NTFS?

Shimo · Post by **Shimo** » 18 Jul 2008, 21:27

Hey I have a friend who really wants to install Linux on his laptop. Problem is he has about 14 kbs of bad sector. He does not want to lose his windows installation but can not partition the drive... We were wondering if there is a way to install a linux distro preferably suse along side windows on the same ntfs partition. Or are we just shooting for the moon?

Post by **ayu** » 19 Jul 2008, 01:39

Well they can't dual boot or anything if they are on the same partition, but you can install it virtually. You can either use VMware or virtualbox, I recommend the second one since it's completely free and needs no registration and crap. Also some distros have the option to be installed on windows (never tried that though, but I know Ubuntu can).

akadeadman · Post by **akadeadman** » 19 Jul 2008, 09:04

do you know of any other distros that have that as well?

Post by **bad_brain** » 19 Jul 2008, 09:37

hm, I am not aware of distros that run on NTFS, and even if it can be done (Ubuntu, as cats said) I wouldn't recommend it...NTFS support for Linux works already pretty good (ntfs-3g) but it is still far away from being really stable.
so I recommend to defrag the HDD and then resize the partition/create a new one for Linux with gparted for example.

akadeadman · Post by **akadeadman** » 19 Jul 2008, 09:55

i have defragged many times and it seems to no avail and gparted refuses to allow me to partition

Post by **bad_brain** » 19 Jul 2008, 10:02

hm, try it again after disabling the swap space for windows, I heard gparted can be a little bitchy about it...

but backup all important files before any resizing!

Shimo · Post by **Shimo** » 19 Jul 2008, 13:46

I've suggested to him to maybe force resize with a live cd through console. Would that work well?

Post by **bad_brain** » 19 Jul 2008, 14:51

well, the link to gparted I posted above is the one to the live distro. gparted just the graphical (Gnome) interface of parted, which is the command line HDD tool of pretty any Linux distribution...

the chances resizing works are much better with the live distro than with any app running on Windows itself...

Shimo · Post by **Shimo** » 19 Jul 2008, 14:56

Well yeah but I was wondering if he consoled it and added a -f to force it just to the left of the bad sector for windows then make the ext3 just on the right of it. Leaveing about 1-2 mbs unpartitioned where the bad sector is.

Post by **bad_brain** » 19 Jul 2008, 15:00

the bad sectors will be recognized during the format process and will not be used anyway, bad sectors will not cause any resize problems...at least not if there are not really many of them (I mean THAT many that the HDD would be pretty unusable anyway)...

leechy9 · Post by **leechy9** » 20 Jul 2008, 13:00

go to your drive under my computer, and click on properties. then run like the disk check or whatever the hell its called lol. (i havent used windows in a long time) one of them will have the option to recover ruined sectors in the HDD. i myself wouldnt like to run linux on NTFS due to the fact that its really crappy and has to be defragged unlike EXT-3

akadeadman · Post by **akadeadman** » 21 Jul 2008, 13:02

i have run other tools that check the bad sectors and they all say i don't have any bad sectors... so now what

Post by **bad_brain** » 21 Jul 2008, 13:34

once again: bad sectors don't matter as long as none is in sector 0.
download the gparted live distro from the link I posted above, disable swap space on your MS system, then boot the live CD...resizing should work out of the box then.

akadeadman · Post by **akadeadman** » 21 Jul 2008, 13:53

whats swap space

leechy9 · Post by **leechy9** » 25 Jul 2008, 15:27

he means page file (its called swap in linux). when your computer runs out of ram, it has to store the data somewhere so it stores it in a spot on your harddrive called page file. but ya, u can usually disable it by opening my computer right clicking on your harddrive and from there u can usually find page file options.