M17x and installing Vista, CentOS Linux & AlienRespawn (info)

This whole thing started off w/ needing Vista, Linux (CentOS 5.3) and AlienRespawn on my M17x (think Virtualization & CUDA.) The AlienRespawn partition is a thing of beauty. Although it does take up nearly 15GB of space it's a few clicks away from factory restore. I hate loading drivers so it had to be saved & available at all costs. I've tried several different things to see what would happen. Please use these destructions at your own risk as things can break badly. Good news however, if you break your junk, you'll get to keep the pieces.

• Save the AlienRespawn partition! Snagged copy of GParted Live 0.4.5-2 ISO and fired it up. Used external USB HD and copied off AlienRespawn partition to an unallocated area on external drive. Boot USB drive and watched it start to fire up. Windows bar appeared, seemed to be working then BSOD. Well that didn't work.

• Need to resize Vista so I have room for CentOS. While Vista will resize itself, it won't do drastic resizes. Vista partition was taking up 300GB of space and I needed it down to 95GB (only need space for BIOS updates, Driver utilities & WoW.) Letting Vista resize itself brought it down to 195GB leaving 95GB ish for Linux. Wanted it the other way around. Fired up GParted again and used it to resize Vista. Finished resizing so now I had 95GB partition, 195GB of free space then on the end of the HD AlienRespawn. Rebooted and Vista did a CHKDSK but was usable! Yay! Didn't think it would work, heard bad things about resizing Vista but I'm GTG. But what if it didn't?? I quickly created an NTFS partition from the 195GB of freespace and labeled it E: drive (for data.)

• So things are looking good but what if Vista got junked up? What if I needed to restore using the AlienRespawn partition? Fired up the AlienRespawn and let it do its thing. It didn't touch the middle partition but nicely restored the 95GB C: partition and I'm GTG. Looks like AlienRespawn plays nice.

• Started Linux install, CentOS 5.3 x86_64, and Disk Druid saw the fakeRAID partitions nicely. Removed middle 195GB partition and carved it up into a boot, root & swap. Left first partition & last partition alone (think C: = Vista & last partition = AlienRespawn.) Next screen was configuring GRUB bootloader options. It will intentionally leave the AlienRespawn partition out of the options list cause it's marked hidden. Just add it as an option & give it an appropriate label. Finished install & rebooted. Grub bootloader was installed at MBR and allowed me to boot Vista, CentOS & AlienRespawn perfectly. I had all three choices! Polished off another Scotch and pondered, what if I mess up Vista again. Oh-Nos!

• Fired up AlienRespawn and selected drastic recovery option. AlienRespawn blows away GRUB, reloads the first partition w/ fresh install of Vista & all drivers. Upon reboot I can press F10 for AlienRespawn or slide into Vista. Linux appears to be gone but isn't. GParted sees all three linux partitions you'll just need to reload GRUB and configure as appropriate.

All in all, pretty pleased w/ how things worked. This is definitely the optimal solution for me.

Things of interest:
A) That AlienRespawn partition is pretty cool. Wonder what goodies are in there besides that 6GB base.wim file. Did 2 hours worth of searching and didn't find anything in detail. Please post links and school me.
B) The 10 LED color zones are neat but as useful as t!ts on a bull. Wonder if a Linux module exists that can change color zones based on various alerts (temps, fan speeds or email notification. Possiblities are limitless here.) Just think what kind of geek points you'd get when your keyboard changed from blue to red when running Intel burn in test because temps are going up.
C) When I tried booting off my eSATA drive GParted got really confused on the RAID 0 partition. Wonder if you can remove the DVD and slap in another HD & customize the RAID BIOS for RAID 5 w/ 3 SATA drives. Sure it's still fakeRAID but it could be an option. Personal note, ditch spindle drives when SSDs become cost effective.

 

i like your style

 

Damn good first post!

 

better then

" how do i overclock "

or

"OHHH NOOZZZZ" (i can't spell like a adult )

 

thanks moo...i guess that was ment for me......lol

 

no not just you. We have had proabaly 15 threads on how to overclock.

We have a thread devoeted to the q9000 how to overclock and a M17x overclocking thread. Also in some of the overclockign threads we went into detail.

Also its better to post in the M17x owners lounge then make a whole new thread.

OR

look around with owners of the same CPU and PM them and ask them to save server space

 

Thanks Gents. I almost posted this under the Linux area as I worried it wouldn't be specific enough to the AW area. Still wrestling w/ CentOS & the M17x. Totally sweet laptop. It's way too funny that I had to buy a high end gaming rig to finally meet my needs. I will eventually write some code for the 10 different LED zones as being able to control them for notifications is just too cool to pass up.

I'd like the touchpad area to change color based on emails (either I've recieved an email or it's from someone important, or it was marked 'high importance'.) And I still think the keypad zones should change color based on temp & fan speeds. Judging by the latency of color changes using the AW software, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess changing LED color to music won't be an option.

*Q imagines playing Beastie Boys and laptop flashing in Sync*

 

I like this idea.. A lot
very innovative

 

Question, what do you use your CentOS for ? I mean, you can avoid all that by using a virtual pc program. VMware (paid) Virtualbox (free) for eg, you can allocate 3gb ram to it and both cpu cores (or all four if you have a quad).

Of course you are going to loose some performance but a bit of performance vs all that trouble Of course as i said, depends what are you using your other OS for.

 

Good question. I run CentOS (which IS Redhat Server AS Enterprise edition) because 1) That's what we run at work. 2) VMWare Workstation 6.5 for Linux supports CentOS/Redhat 5.0+. VMWare Workstation on Linux rocks.

Linux takes up far less resources then Windows which means more VMs running simultaneously. For work, I've run WinXP w/ Office 2003 Pro in a VM on Linux for years. Problem is, I'm always working/building another server VM on my laptop so resources get tight quick. Current project is a transparent proxy server that I'll slip into the VMWare ESX farm once completed. So your next question should be, "Well, why don't you use Ubuntu? It's the new hotness!" Well it is, but I'm an RPM package kind of guy. Plus, VMWare Workstation for Linux doesn't support Ubuntu 9.0+ only version 8.0+ LTS. So why aren't I running Fedora then? A) Fedora has a craptastic support cycle, you're always reinstalling/upgrading. CentOS/Redhat supports for 5+ years. B) VMWare Workstation doesn't run on Fedora.

Plus, I'm dying to work with CUDA on Linux and see how fast I can bust encryption hashs and stuff. This was one of the few laptops that had Quad core, Nvidia supported CUDA cards and up to 8GB of ram. Plus the RAID 0 seriously helps too.

 

Hm, VM ware doesnt support new version of ubuntu ? Been running Virtualbox for about a month now on ubuntu 9.04 , give it a shot. Nothing to loose actually, its free

http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

But yea, depends which OS you prefer yourself. Ive got three notebooks to play around here

 

Do not tempt me w/ your Voodoo! Seriously, that is tempting. There's a number of different virtualization technologies out there and just not enough time. If you ever get a chance to log into an ESX server, just cat out /etc/redhat-release and you'll see that ESX 3.5 IS Redhat version 3. So I sort of pick my technologies around what work uses. Gives me a jump at work (I am a command-line guru .)

 

Thats true. If it gets the job done thats all that matters