[vox] Installfest?

[T. Mark]

No time just now to do justice to all the issues raised in this thread, but wanted to chime in at least with the following:

I've a good bit of experience installing dual- & multi-boot setups.  Absolutely a pleasure, spreading free (as in freedom) OS'es to folks.  But it's certainly time-consuming and sometimes arduous, so I figure I'm going to start charging by the hour (seems sensible since I'm flat broke and increasingly desparate.)

I'd be happy to give free advice at installfests, though, having enjoyed them back in the day.  BUT PLEASE:  to anyone wishing to have this assistance--  i.e. one or more Linuxes installed alongside your problematically-proprietary, came-with-the-hardware OS--  you must do these 2 things before arriving:
1: Make a bit-for-bit backup of your entire harddrive.  The dd command does this, and its correct usage is indeed complex.  Clonezilla Live CD does wonders along these lines, providing the most sensible defaults and compressing on the fly.  (I was looking for a magazine tutorial that was even simpler, but unable to find it.. for now try this: http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/tutorials/back-up-your-system-with-clonezilla-tutorial  )
2: FULLY defragment the NTFS partition.  (Chkdsk goes without saying, I hope, prior to this.)  Come to think of it, you'll want to do this before item (1) .. and it'd make good sense to move beefy media files off to external storage of some kind, too, so Clonezilla doesnt spend gobs of time compressing already-compressed data.  (I haven't used Windowz since xp, btw--  did they ever perfect the defrag program to where it competes with "JKDefrag" & other independent ones that've proven superior?)

With the NTFS all defragged and packed into a solid block, GParted can then resize that partition easily & free up room for cushdy Operating System goodness!

Peace,
  Mark
  
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