Partition HP Mini-Note after Installing XP
The best time to create partitions for dual boot at the HP mini-note is right after you install Windows XP. With XP as the first partition your main partition will be fairly clean which will make the resizing operation go much more quickly. Besides you will able to save yourself a lot of headache also if anything goes wrong and you wind up wiping your Windows partition, because you won’t have spent days loading and configuring all of your favorite programs yet.
With the assumption you are using a USB flash drive, but you can also use Parted Magic from a CD-ROM. The main difference is that if you’re using a flash drive, you need to use SYSLINUX to make it bootable.
Once you’ve got your installation media, here are the following ways to create partitions for use as dual boot at the HP mini-note:
1. Reboot HP Mini-Note with the flash drive or CD-ROM plugged into a USB port.
2. Press F9 and choose the device you want to boot from.
3. At the boot menu, make sure to select option 4: Failsafe Settings and wait for several minutes until a command prompt appears “root@PartedMagic:~#”
4. Now Type “menu” and Choose Xvesa
5. Now you should see a user interface with the blue background
6. Hit the little blue icon on the bottom of the screen that says “VisParted.”
Once you are in a partition manager your primary hard drive should be listed as /dev/sda. However if it’s not, you couldn’t be too hard to find since you probably only have one 120GB hard drive connected to your PC. Just for your notice usually VisParted will say your hard drive is actually closer to 112GB. There should be one large partition labeled as /dev/sda1. So here the next steps:
7. Right click on this and choose the resize/move option
8. Resize the partition either by dragging the edges or entering a value into the “new size” box.
9. Once your Windows partition is shrunk, you an either leave the rest of your hard drive unpartitioned for future use, create an ext2, ext3 or other partition for Linux, or do something else altogether.
10. Now execute by hit the apply button.
When Parted Magic is done, it works like a charm. You can make dual boot on HP mini-note and then reboot system by clicking on the shutdown menu at the bottom right side of your screen. If everything goes properly, you should still be able to boot into Windows, but might you’ll find your Windows partition is smaller. For this, you can decide to create, just said, a 25GB Windows XP partition for files and settings, a 15GB ext2 partition for installing Ubuntu or other operating systems, and the rest other space you can use as the third NTFS partition for storing data that will be accessible no matter which OS you use.
