First things first, we have to clear some space on the HDD. I'm not ready to kill Vista entirely yet since I might need to use the Device Manager to look at settings etc. So I fire up the Disk Management module and delete the redundant 1GB D: partition which exists for no obvious reason. I'm leaving the 1.5GB hidden "EISA Configuration" partition for now (what a quaint anachronism!) as they often contain useful "recovery-type-stuff" but I can't be bothered to look at the moment.
I resize the Vista partition to give us some space...and it won't shrink smaller than 24GB even though there's "only" 10GB of stuff on it (for a "basic" Vista Business install!). Hmm, WTF - okay let's do a disk cleanup and a defrag and see if that improves anything...nope! OK, what else have we got that clogs up the filesystem?
Shadow copies & Restore points, that's what. Switch them off and I can resize away to give me 18GB for Vista, 18GB for OpenSuse and 1.5GB for EISA which makes 40 HDD-sales-GB. So three basically tiny restore points (I hadn't messed with Vista much) clogged 14GB of filesystem - nice.
The U810 doesn't come with an optical drive but I have a rather useful USB to IDE cable from Maplin which did the trick (not an enclosure which you have to mess about with, just a cable with a Molex) along with a random spare DVD drive I had lying around.
Drop in the OpenSuSE 10.3 DVD (32-bit for the A110 processor) and fire up the installer from inside Vista. This patches the MBR on the disk and starts the installer on reboot after which it's the standard OpenSuSE install. Next time you reboot into Windows it tries to uninstall itself (how very tidy and polite!) but Windows blocks it since I'm in "Protected Admin" mode which offers no real protection and a whole lot of irritation so I have to run it manually.
I've installed the standard desktop configuration...now the fun begins.
2 comments:
do you think it is better to start the install process with the dvd or the livecd ? or is it the same ?
Historically, I've always used the DVD version - just so I have everything local for the installation. Otherwise you are relying on networking being OK at the outset. Based on other comments, I wasn't sure that would be the case - however, it turned out to be fine.
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