[mdlug] CloneZilla

[Robert Citek]

Good move on thinking about backing up your data before touching the disk.

While you may have your heart set on resizing and repartitioning for a
dual boot, another option would be to use an external USB drive.

About a year ago I had a company laptop on which I was not allowed to
install anything on WinXP.  Yet the projects I was working on required
a full Linux install.  The ideal setup would have been to install a
VM.  But since that was out of the question, my solution was to change
the boot order in the BIOS, install Linux on an extern USB drive, and
make the USB drive bootable.  In the ends, the internal hard drive
stayed virgin and I was able to get the projects completed.  Here are
some photos of the setup:

http://picasaweb.google.com/Robert.Citek/USBDrive#

Good luck on whatever path you take and please let us know how it goes.

Regards,
- Robert

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 4:43 PM, Robert Jim Fulner
<fulner at alumni.nmu.edu> wrote:
> It looks like just what I'm looking for. All of my
> experience/experimentation with GNU/Linux has always been either off of Live
> Media or full hard disk installs. I've never dual booted, I recently have
> come into a laptop running XP, that Unfortunately I need to keep for some of
> the course I'm taking at OCC that require Windoze software that not run so
> good in WINE. So I've got that excuse for an operating system working the
> way I want to, and I wanted to find a way to save that configuration before
> I start playing with various dual boot scenarios. Unfortunately my hard disk
> isn't too big (20GB) and my RAM too isn't great (512MB) so I'm not sure if
> my preferred distro, Mandraiva, is going to work well. I'm considering
> playing with Arch Linux, but wanted to make sure it was easy to get back to
> they way my XP set up if something is less than desirable is encountered.
>
> Just looking for any of your experience with Clonezilla, or any better
> solutions. Also any other insight on Arch, or a different distrios would be
> welcome too. I'd like all my machines to be runnign a different distro, just
> for the fun of it. Currently my desktop is running Debian, my XO OLPC of
> course is Fedora (sort of) and my other laptop is Puppy Linux.