For ADIOS version 4

Introduction

The following describes the steps required to install the ADIOS BootCD files onto a hard disk by resizing an existing NTFS partition to make space for a new partition.

We have found that a large number of students/users who use the ADIOS BootCD at home cannot use options 2 from the menu because they only have NTFS partitions on their machine. Even though Linux does support writing to NTFS partitions it is regarded as 'dangerous', hence we do not write to NTFS and only write to FAT and EXT2/EXT3 partitions instead.

Run option 5 on the ADIOS boot CD menu automates the procedure described in this document.   It works by:

1. reducing the size of an NTFS partition using ntfsresize
2. using fdisk and mke2fs to create a new EXT3 partition in the space made available by ntfsresize
3. copying the files from the ADIOS BootCD into the new partition
4. running fdisk again to make the new partition active (bootable)
5. and finally installing the LILO/GRUB boot loader into the boot sector of the new partition

However option 5 is intentionally very limited in that it only works if the machine has a single hard disk with a single NTFS partition on it (ie /dev/hda1). For other configurations we have provided commands that users can type in at the ADIOS BootCD menu. The commands described in this document apply to versions 4 of the Boot CD.

Example hard disk configuration

In this document we will use the hard drive configuration shown on the left as an example to help illustrate how the commands work. In our example configuration we have a single disk with two NTFS partitions: a 5Gb partition containing the Windows system files and a 15Gb partition being used for data which will be the one we resize.

Preparation

Before you merrily start resizing partitions and installing ADIOS there are few things you should do and information you should know.

• You MUST DEFRAGMENT the NTFS partition you are going to resize. Currently ntfsresize doesn't perform defragmentation itself, so you must boot into Windows and do this.
• Check the available space on the partition to be resized and make sure there will be enough space left over after installing ADIOS to still be useful for your Windows stuff. The minimum space required to install ADIOS is 4Gb.

Commands to type at bootcd prompt

The following commands must be typed in at the ADIOS Boot CD menu in the order in which they appear.

1. umount
2. ntfsresize
3. fdisk
4. install

The following are descriptions of each of the commands.

umount

The partition to be resized must be unmounted for before using ntfsresize. In our case the partition chosen was /mnt/disc0/part2.

ntfsresize

Specify the device name corresponding to the partition you just unmounted - /dev/hda2 in our case. Next you specify the size of the new partition into which the ADIOS files will be installed. The size must be specified in megabytes and we entered 4000, which is the minimum allowed size for the ADIOS partition.

The message displayed by ntfsresize when it has finished is exactly what we will do next.

fdisk

This is the most complex step and being comfortable with using fdisk would certainly be an advantage. We try to show you the steps from our example as much as possible to help you with your own disk/partition setup.

• First of all fdisk asks for the disk whose partition table we will alter - /dev/hda in our case.
• Type p to view the partition information and write down the values for the starting and ending cylinders and block size of the NTFS partition to be resized. In our case these values were 639, 2551 and 15366172 respectively.
• Delete the old NTFS partition entry (don't worry, we are only deleting the partition table entry not the physical partition on the disk). In our case we have to delete /dev/hda2 so we typed in:
  
  • d
  • 2
    
• Now to recreate the entry for NTFS partition with its new size. To calculate the new (exact) size of the partition in Mb follow these steps:
  
  • Take the size in blocks of the old partition.
    15366172 blocks in our case (this number is expressed in Kb).
  • Divide that by 1024 to convert from Kb to Mb.
    15366172/1024 = 15006 (Mb).
  • Finally subtract the size you specified for the ADIOS partition.
    15006 - 4000 = 11006
    Therefore 11006 (Mb) will be the new size of our NTFS partition.

  So in our case, to recreate the NTFS partition with a size of 11006Mb, we typed in the following:

  • n
  • p
  • 2
  • <enter> (to choose default starting cylinder - which should be the same value as the starting cylinder for the old /dev/hda2)
  • +11006M
  • t
  • 2
  • 7

  The last 3 keystrokes (t 2 7) were used to specify NTFS as the type of the new partition.
  
  Now to create a partition table entry for the new ADIOS partition we typed in:

  • n
  • p
  • 3
  • <enter> (to choose the default starting cylinder)
  • 2551 (this is the same value as the old /dev/hda2 ending cylinder number)

  And finally we have to toggle the bootable flag between the Windows boot partition (/dev/hda1 in our case) and the new ADIOS partition (/dev/hda3 in our case). This marks the ADIOS partition as the active partition and will be the one the MBR code will refer to for displaying the list of OSes to boot on the machine. To do this we typed in:

  • a
  • 1
  • a
  • 3
  • p (to view the new partition table and make sure it looks correct)
  • w (to write the new partition to disk!)

That it for fdisk. The rest of the procedure is a breeze.

install

Formats the new ADIOS partition to EXT3, copies all the ADIOS BootCD files into it and then installs LILO into it's boot sector. In our case the partition was /dev/hda3.

Note: This process will take a while, mainly depending on the speed of your CD-ROM drive. On our test machine (1GHz Pentium 3, 512Mb RAM, 40x CD-ROM drive) it took about 15 minutes to copy all the files across.

The LILO configuration includes an entry to boot Windows off partition /dev/hda1.

That's it! Our example hard disk partition configuration now looks like the one shown on the left. When you reboot your machine you should see a LILO boot screen giving you the option of booting Windows (from /dev/hda1) or ADIOS (/dev/hda3 in our case). Enjoy your Linux installation.