Repartition advice please?

[wayne1932]

My Desktop machine has a 160GB drive which has my WinXP and my PCLOS3.5.10 install on it.  both working satisfactorily.
I have a second 500GB (465 GiB) drive which houses my PCLOS4.5 install, an experimental 4.5 install, and several data partitions. I have 128GB not allocated. 

All of these installs work OK, but due to the haphazard way I did all this, I have some problems with the drive:  the partitions are created out of order; I have sdb5-9 with no apparent primary Extended partition to house them; a sda1 that is a primary partition with my experimental PCLOS4.5, but it is not at the beginning of the drive.  This is all working OK at the present time with my grub setup, I can boot into any of these.   BUT--both Gparted and KpartitionManager tell me that I have 465GiB unallocated on this drive.  Within PCLOS I can create and delete partitions in the 128Gb unallocated area it finds.   

I want to clean up this mess by reformatting the drive and reloading my software.  I am in the process of backing up all my irreplaceable data (approximately 100GB including my .thunderbird folder) to an external harddrive.  And I may create a partition in the 128GB presently unallocated (which is at the end of the drive) and copy all that irreplaceable data to it.  I have already created a livedvd with all the programs I usually use and my customizations. I would recreate this, if I don't get around to implementing my plan soon.

My plan:  with my data backed up to the last partition on the drive and the external hard drive:
1. Delete all the partitions on this 500GB (465GiB)drive, except the one where my backup data resides.
2. Create a 50GB primary partition at the beginning of the drive formatted NTFS for a future install of WinXP (just in case that first drive fails) but not install XP just yet.
3. Create a second (Extended) primary partition to house all the rest of my partitions. 
4.  Within the Extended partition, create a 15GB partition for root, 2Gb swap, 20GB /home, and some data partitions (MyMusic, MyDocuments, MyPictures, MyMiscellaneous) for permanent data storage and leave some space unformatted for future use. With these data partitions, if I reinstall, or install a new distro(can't imagine leaving PCLOS right now), my data is there and available. 

I have a couple of questions about this:
1. Will the empty NTFS partition cause any problems?  I'm no M$ guru.
2. What will happen to the partition (probably sda10) with my back up data? Does it get lost in the shuffle?   I know it would get renumbered. Its data is still backed up to the external hard drive,  so maybe that's not a disaster, but I'm still leary. I don't want to lose a lifetime of pictures, music, tax records, etc, etc. My tax and financial records are in Windows and included in my backup data.

Thanks for any ideas you may have about this.

[Was_Just19]

I have a couple of questions about this:
1. Will the empty NTFS partition cause any problems?  I'm no M$ guru.
2. What will happen to the partition (probably sda10) with my back up data? Does it get lost in the shuffle?   I know it would get renumbered. Its data is still backed up to the external hard drive,  so maybe that's not a disaster, but I'm still leary. I don't want to lose a lifetime of pictures, music, tax records, etc, etc. My tax and financial records are in Windows and included in my backup data.

Thanks for any ideas you may have about this.

Make sure you create and format the NTFS partition.
It should not have any effect on the rest.

I would advise not copying the data to a partition on the drive until after you have created the Extended partition, and therefore could create a partition at the end of the drive to accept the data. That partition would then be a Logical partition, and not cause out of sequence numbering.
Do that before the rest to ensure you have two copies of the data.
(personally I would just unplug and power off the external drive until all was ready ....  but then I probably don't have anything backed up that I could not live without.)

The numbering of the partitions after they are ceated should be checked and if necessary corrected before installing any OS.

regards.

[wayne1932]

One more thing:  Can anyone think of any *.conf type of files that need to be backed up? I have had so much trouble with getting samba to work, I know that smb.conf is in my backup data; as a matter of fact I just copied the whole /etc/* folder over there.  But there might be some configuration files elsewhere that I don't know about. 

I was getting uneasy about making sure that I have everything in two places, so I looked at the space available on my 160GB drive and I put some of it there.  Some of it was there to start with:  thank you Krusader. So I will probably start out with a completely clean hard drive.

[MCP]

What you have outlined is very ambitious.  One I would hesitate to do.  But what I will add is not to delay in installing XP.  I would do that first after reformatting the harddrive.  The reason is that it will wipe out your MBR when you do install it and you will have the headache of reinstalling that.  So it would just be a preemptive process to install it first, then install PCLOS.

MCP

[Was_Just19]

What you have outlined is very ambitious.  One I would hesitate to do.  But what I will add is not to delay in installing XP.  I would do that first after reformatting the harddrive.  The reason is that it will wipe out your MBR when you do install it and you will have the headache of reinstalling that.  So it would just be a preemptive process to install it first, then install PCLOS.

MCP

True installing Win will write to the MBR .....  but it is a simple matter to rewrite Grub to the MBR afterwards.

[wayne1932]

/boot/grub/* is one of the things I am backing up for reference.   Yeah I know I may have to edit it to get the (hx,y) items to line up the way I want to.  Maybe if I'm lucky the install  or redo-mbr will find everything for me. 

[wayne1932]

I took Dobie by the horns last night.     

I made a last livecd of my experimental install which includes the programs I usually use.   (1.5Gb with OOo)

Booted with it.

Using PCC>Hardware>Harddrive>Configure, wiped all partitions on my sdb.  (465GiB)

Created my Partitions as previously discussed. Primary sdb1 NTFS, Extended sdb2  with sdb5-12 All with ext4,

Installed my livecd.

Held my breath and rebooted into new system.
Copied my data from the External Harddrive to the right directories (partitions)
Created links in home to those partitions.

Surprises:   
   My customized Desktop was not available.  I had to recreate my user and recustomize, couldn't use the one on the livecd.  there might have been another way to do this.
   Probably should have suspected this:  After copying my backed up data to the right partitions, I had to do a lot of "chown"
   Stupid stunt:  I forgot to copy my .thunderbird folder somewhere safe.  I had put it on one of the partitions that got wiped.  But I could copy the directory from my KDE3.5    partition.  Lost all emails that I had downloaded since I last checked email under 3.5.
   Writing bootloader didn't find my PCLOS3.5 on sda. but it did find my WinXP there, and the empty NTFS partition on sdb.  Since I had backed up my menu.lst all I had to do was copy that stanza from the backup into the working one.

Problem: My sound is still unreliable.   Sometimes a reboot will not have sound,  then I have to find which PIDs are in use and kill them, restart ALSA, and kmix. My sound card  must hate me. (OLD soundblaster!live)