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Subject : Re: LUG: How to install Windows XP onto Linux machine

From : Justin Parker <xjparkerx@gmail.[redacted]>

Date : Fri, 16 Apr 2010 16:38:45 -0400

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On 04/16/2010 02:43 PM, Daniel Underwood wrote: 
When using parted to resize a partition, do you lose the files on that
partition?  Even if you have more free space on that partition that the
amount by which you're resizing the partition?
Hello,

I don't quite understand this question but; almost all modern partition editors esp. those on a linux box should allow you to shrink or grow without causing data loss.  If it doesn't then I wouldn't use it.  Gparted is the graphical version of parted and is basically just a frontend for parted.  I've actually never lost data when doing a resize with gparted.  Even doing a resize on fat32 and NTFS.  However, backups are recommended because it only takes one screw up and your data is gone.   Better to be safe than sorry.   If I understand your original question you would actually shave off free space from the current home partition in order to create a new partition for the windows install.

Just curious, why not go the virtual machine route?  Virtualbox is a different beast than Parallels.  All the way down to different virtual drivers.  However, I wouldn't recommend any virtual machine option if you are planning on running some type of voip with video unless you have quite a bit of ram to give to the vm like 4 gigs or more and a beafy cpu.

I ran a dual boot system for a long time for work and it just got to be a real pain the rear having to shut down just to get to what I needed on the os I wasn't running at the time I needed to get to something.  That could be remedied with some type of network storage but then the question becomes,  did save everything I need before I reboot into the other os.  Now I'm running vm's of the work image and I used VMware converter to convert that image to a vm so I wouldn't lose anything like domain access or data by doing a whole new install.  Converter is pretty slick and Virtualbox now has support for using vmware virtual disks.

Hope this helps,
Justin

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