Converting an XP PC to Linux Mint

[navychop]

Some background is in this thread. I've started a new thread because the problem "has moved on" so to speak.

I have an XP Pro PC, ASUS A8N-SLI mobo, Athlon 64 single core 2.2GHz, 2GB DDR-400 RAM, two HDDs, each 250GB ( C: & D: ) and two optical drives, one a generic DVD reader, one a Sony DRU-500A. I am trying to convert it to a dual boot, XP Pro and Linux Mint machine.

Purpose:

1. To read Dish EHDs and produce printouts of the titles and perhaps descriptions, perhaps by outputting a file in a format readable by Excel, which would then do the sorting, etc.

2. To get back to fiddling with Linux again, and get back into a little programming (Free Pascal to start with).


With some fiddling (disconnect generic DVD & just use the Sony), I am able to boot from the DVD and enter Linux Mint (slowly) and start the conversion process. First, I get:




Selecting dual, I get:




I went with that, and get:




And so then I get:




Double ungood. So I went ahead anyway and got:




Which went nowhere. I repeated the process and fiddled with the partitions, as below:




Which went nowhere. No joy. So I looked up the Windows Dynamic Disk bit, learned a bit, and it basically comes down to two options:

1. Try to convert from dynamic to basic using THIS as discussed HERE as (cut to the chase) option 3.

2. Not bother with the above, and just convert the entire PC to Linux and abandon the XP Pro side ( "replace" or "something else" ). Haven't used it in years, what I needed was moved off long ago, only thing I forgot to do was copy a floppy to a CD, but that can still be done.

Not sure if option 1 would even work on my particular setup. Heck, I'm not even sure option 2 would work. It would seem I have nothing but time to lose to try option 1, but perhaps someone more knowledgeable than me can explain.

Or is there another option?

 

[mike123abc]

Sounds like a good use of an old computer!

 

[navychop]

And I saved it from W8!

 

[. Raine]

You could maybe put a second drive in the computer for Linux to use all by itself and let windows have that drive to itself. I did that with Ubuntu on one of my computers that was giving me a hard time with windows partitions.

 

[navychop]

Windows currently spread across C: & D: IDE.

At the screen that seems to give me an option to pick drives, it really only allows the one choice shown. But I could put in an SATA drive and see if it sees that. Might give it a try. Maybe a blank unused one; or one formatted NTFS or FAT.

Sent from my iPhone using SatelliteGuys

 

[navychop]

Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy!

OK, I tried the demo of AOMEI Dynamic Disk converter and learned to save my $30 (the demo does nothing but demonstrate how easy it is, you must PAY to actually complete the job). It did not give the option of converting the C: drive to basic. I'm not surprised, IIRC that HDD is too large for basic in the first place. Playing around with partition sizes is impractical. So I hooked up a 120GB SATA that was installed in the PC that I had forgotten about. WOW! It had backups from a PC of about 15 years ago, an AMD K6. I must have moved that backup set from HDD to HDD until it ended up on a SATA. Anyway, no point in just converting D: (the second IDE HDD), I suppose. Well, I supposed wrong, but it was unnecessary and I saved my $30 anyway. I am determined to do this on the cheap.

The mobo BIOS is ver 1001, WAY obsolete (I learned to disable "full screen" on bootup so I could read -quickly- the BIOS ver), but it recognized the SATA drive. XP, however, did not. Not even under Manage under Computer, just flat invisible. No problem, I booted up under the Linux Mint DVD, and Mint saw it. So I'm now installing Linux Mint on the SATA drive, repartitioning it to give Mint 70.1GB and be dual boot. This, according to the screen, will take quite some time.

Well, it would not repartition the SATA drive- Dynamic disk, again. So I tried with the default partitioning (46GB), as a "just in case it works anyway." Of course, it did not.

So I exited the program, copied a directory of old pictures from the SATA to D: as a test (WXP directory moved by Linux). Turned out to be a large directory, 18GB and Linux is telling me about 15 minutes to complete. I'd say it took about 5 minutes. I then restarted the process to install Linux Mint. I selected "Something Else" in order to mess with the SATA drive, EXT4, swap space of 30GB, root in the 90GB.

Took about an hour to do the partitioning. Then I had to go back and specify the \ as being at the beginning of the 90GB partition, and pick my time zone, password and computer name (best to just use your 2 initials, I found).

Then it started a nice little slide show while installing. Banshee for music (not familiar with) and VLC for video/DVD, which I hear has a good rep. gThumb and Picasa for photos. And of course there's Thunderbird for email, which I do not plan on using, and LibreOffice to replace MS Office. It's a version of Open Office. Skype, WINE and other s/w is included.

They claim Linux Mint is the fourth most widely used operating system in the world.


COMPLETION

Anyway, after it was done, I discovered I could no longer boot to XP anyway, even though it is a separate HDD. I might test it later by removing the SATA drive and see what happens.

So I went into SETUP and changed the hard drive configuration to where the SATA was the first in the list of HDDs. And restarted. Works like a charm. I now have a "Welcome to Linux Mint" dialog box on my screen.



So I plugged in a Dish EHD and - IT WORKS! Perfectly visible.

Now to download and install Pascal and then the work begins!


Any questions/requests?