CentOS To Reside Near A NTFS System

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Hello there,

the *old* PC (Turion 64 MT-32 800MHz, 1Gb RAM) of my gf is running Windows XP, and I plan on installing a CentOS beside of it, allowing her to select the OS at boot-time. Other system/OS installing options are not retained, please avoid ;-).

My first attempt was to install the CentOS7 GNOME-Live on a USB
flashdisk and to boot it on the machine. It was either freezing at grub stage (!?) or later at GDM login stage. I gave up.

Then I installed the CentOS6 LiveCD on the USB flashdisk, and booted in on the machine. Works fine so far, but it cannot mount the Windows NTFS
partition (unknown partition type – no NTFS driver in the Live system?)
so I cannot either access the user data in the NTFS partition, nor shrink the NTFS partition in order to install the CentOS6 system on disk.

So I’m wondering, if ever I boot from a pmagic live system and succeed in shrinking down the NTFS and make room for the CentOS6 install:

– will the CentOS6 live system be able to install at all and allow
dual boot so that it’s conservative WRT the existing Windows system?

– once installed, will the CentOS6 system be able to mount read-WRITE
the NTFS partition (even if I have to install an alternative
repository)? Read-only would be useless to us.

– why not, is there a way I could get success with the CentOS7? If
not, the CentOS6 is fine with me.

Those are the pre-requisites for me to run CentOS6 on this – ah-hum –
slow system and be happy with it.

Any though?

Regards,

4 thoughts on - CentOS To Reside Near A NTFS System

  • I strongly dislike shrinking file systems in place, and prefer to backup the whole FS, repartition the disk, then restore the FS to the new smaller partition. for Windows NTFS systems, I usually do this with Acronis True Image Home.

    but, I really dislike multibooting different OS’s, its just a general pain. there’s all sorts of gotchas, for example: do NOT let the windows system hibernate instead of fully shut down if you’re going to touch NTFS with another OS or you’ll likely get some hellacious file system corruptions.

  • Hello John,

    Well, to my (pretty long) experience in computers (though I’m still asking for advice), I quite never met any of the points you’re mentioning, with dual boots and shrinking system FS’s. Anyhow, accepting your experience and thanking you for sharing it, I don’t find in you reply any answer to my question ;-).

    Regards,