On Sun, 17 Dec 2006 17:19:16 -0600
Brian de Alwis <bsd@cs.ubc.ca> wrote:

> I now configure any WinXP laptops to have a separate partition for
> my data, which I configure as a FAT32 partition so I can write to
> it from NetBSD.  Then for upgrades I use NetBSD and tar/cpio to
> copy the data over the network.  May take overnight, but it generally
> saves me a lot of hassle.
> 
> This two-partition setup also greatly simplifies doing re-installs
> of WinXP as I can just blow away the C: drive, recreate it, and
> reinstall any apps (from the distributed .zips saved on the data
> partition).

That's a good idea, though as I said I had little if any data on
Windows.  If I boot into Windows, it's to run Office on documents that
Openoffice can't deal with.  I just move those via a flash disk.  I
just didn't want to hunt up CDs for the applications I'd need to
reinstall.
> 
> I use the Linux System Rescue CD <www.sysrescd.org> and use `parted'
> (or is it qparted?) to shrink the WinXP partition to 8-10GB.  It's
> a simple Qt app and has worked fine for me.
> 

I didn't know about qparted; however, according to
http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/features.shtml parted can't resize
NTFS partitions.

I finally figured out a simple approach that worked well.  Since the
BIOS geometries of the old and new disks were the same, I used dd on
NetBSD to do an image copy of the first 15G of the disk, containing
Windows XP and the IBM recovery partition. After that, I used 
'disklabel -D' to delete the NetBSD label and created a new one to
match the larger disk.  It worked quite well, as best I can tell.  I
get to try it again this weekend...

		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb