Drive

I ended up blowing away the Windows drive on the laptop. It got to the point it would not let me shrink the NTFS partition properly. It is really annoying that you have to jump through so many hoops just to get partitions to form the way you want. I've had to deal with crazy setups at work. I've had computers with 8 Linux OS installs on one machine. All set up to boot independently. Only one swap partition that worked for all of them. I have made drives work in just the way I wanted this one to work. It seems I'm more determined at work to finish the job. I just didn't care that much about this one.

Right now, I'm copying information from one partition to the other using, what else, the 'dd' command. It is so frigging easy. If only it worked every time. I tried to move the partition. It would not go because it was inside an extended partition. So, I created a primary partition and am now copying the data. Sounds easy. All kinds of things could go wrong. The alignment might be off. The system may not recognize the correct boot device. The data might be corrupt. The drive might blow up from all the copying. I need to stop dwelling on the negative. I'm upsetting myself.

The screen saver has kicked in. Every few seconds I look over to find if the drive light is still lit. It is going from and to the same drive so that slows things down. The worst thing about the dd method is the lack of a progress method. I can look at the amount of data that has gone by and get an idea, but in so many cases, it is just miles off.

After all was said and done, I ended up just wiping the drive and starting from scratch.