benjarvis.org

The Things I Do to Slay Monsters.

While setting up WoW in Linux was a heroic and generally studly feat, it became obvious that 4-10 FPS (you can see what kind of FPS you get buy pushing CTRL+R in-game) is not going to cut it for actual play. Also given that I wanted to work on music a bit this month, its clear that I need a Windows partition. As fucked up as that is.

So what to do? I figured instead of doing nerve surgery with a chainsaw (complete reinstall of both OSes), I’ve decided to do it the proper way and do some partition shuffling.

At the moment I have Ubuntu installed with 4 partitions (“/boot”, “/”, “/home” and “swap”). “/” was about 40GB and realistically you don’t need much more than 10GB for Linux and Linux software. That would free up 30 GB without sacrificing precious “/home” space and 30GB is fine for Windows with a few games and Ableton Live.

Here was my theoretical process:

1. Use Gparted to resize partitions
2. Use Gparted to create new partition.
3. Install Winblows.
4. Yell FUCK! WHERE IS GRUB?!?
5. Boot Knoppix or Ubuntu or Gparted livecd.
6. Run some sort of grub command to take back the bootloader.
7. ???
8. Profit.

All my research said this is fine. And to my knowledge (combined with other people’s opinions) it actually is.

LATER: Well I get an “A” for effort, but a “F” for poor planning. I started the process last night at 7pm (it is 4pm the following day) and I’m still on step one. Apparently resizing a 40GB partition down to 10GBs is a trivial 20 minute affair while MOVING a 110GB partition is a fucking ORDEAL. I set up the “/” to be 10GB and noticed that there was now a 30GB block of unpartitioned space between it and the 110GB “/home” partition. So my interior OCD voice says “Hey! Let’s move that “/home” partition next to the “/” partition and make the whole Linux side of the disk nice and tidy! Well, it will be nice and tidy…some 24+ hours later. Damn!

Mental note: when partitioning a new install, plan for the unexpected. Either that or murder the OCD voice.