External hard drive partitions.

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hawsey
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External hard drive partitions.

Post by hawsey »

I want to put all my music on my hdd and be able to boot a Joggler image from it like I do with xbmcos and mint but not to effect the music stored on it when I want to try another os.
Could I partition the drive so that the image is on say c and the music on d and when I want to experiment just write the new image to c

Just thinking out loud here but does any one know if this will work?
Think I have worded this badly lol but do you know what I mean....
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Mevi
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Re: External hard drive partitions.

Post by Mevi »

So you want to be able to partition the drive, keep your data safe while you reflash the OS partitions?

You'd have to abandon Win32Imager or similar to write to the HDD as this'll wipe the whole drive, but no doubt that you'd be able to temporarily write to a USB stick or virtual drive and clone those partitions over to the HDD using your favourite disk manager.
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hawsey
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Re: External hard drive partitions.

Post by hawsey »

Thanx Mevi :-)
so far at the minute I have Linux Mint auto booting in to xbmc in the first partition:
In the second partition I have my main music folder all nice and tagged which I scan to xbmc library and also an untagged and sorted new / random folder.
So what you are saying is that I could write an image of say your xp to a usb stick then copy what is written to the first partition I have on my hdd and it will then boot in to xp .
Could I also just copy what is already (mint) in the first partition to another folder and reverse the process if wanted?
Sorry if this sounds basic but its a bit more involved than I usually get.
Cheers
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hawsey
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Re: External hard drive partitions.

Post by hawsey »

I am sure I am just about to cock things up here ;
I had everything working fine but I noticed my lp cover art was not showing up so I exited xbmc and Mint and re booted and was presented with an almost out of memory box.
So I tried to expand the partitions using w7 built in manager first then mini tool partition wizard but the partitions would not expand...
I now have after fiddling 79 gb of unallocated space with mint removed
and a volume named G; 525 gb with my music on.
I also have a 16gb stick with mint on it.
How would I successfully copy what is on the mint usb stick to the 79 GB area without deleting the music on G?

Using mini tool to copy the usb stick, when I select my hdd it says all data will be erased :-/
Is that correct or will it automatically put what I have copied on to the 79 GB unallocated and leave G alone?
Any help would be appreciated :-)
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hawsey
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Re: External hard drive partitions.

Post by hawsey »

So I took the plunge and first tried to create 3 partitions identical to those on my mint usb stick but when I tried to copy them over the tool said the space had to be unallocated so I eventually managed to delete the partitions I created and I now have ....
First three partitions direct copies off the usb boot stick
Forth partition with my music in
But it wont boot arghhhh :-/

Back to the drawing board
If I just wipe everything and get mint booting again using win32disk which partition do I have to expand to stop getting those out of memory issues?
And what would be the easiest way to do it?
I thank you in advance
:-)
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gegs
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Re: External hard drive partitions.

Post by gegs »

I use a live CD version of Gparted to resize partitions on my hard drive. The last time I used it, it didn't support btrfs but apparently it does now. I think you can safely resize data partitions and swap (if there is a swap - I can't remember) but I resized the boot partition out of curiosity once and it wouldn't boot. I didn't think it would, so I don't know why I bothered :)

You can also create partitions easily in any free space. I used the Joggler as a NAS (not so frequently now I've bought a real NAS) and created a large FAT32 partition for media files. This enabled me to power down and attach the hard drive to another computer to copy files to and from the media partition. FAT32 is better supported across platforms than some other file systems and is useful for backing up data to other devices.
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pete
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Re: External hard drive partitions.

Post by pete »

Here too played a bit with GParted and BTFS. The rules are different. Many times though have just read what the text states to do in the GUI then gone to just using a terminal window and typing stuff.

Tricky though (at least for me).

I did utilize it a bunch though when doing my XBMC on the OpenFrame2 install to the 2Gb MMC there. I must though have reformatted the MMC like 10 times redoing this and that. I leave the EFI partition alone though at around 250 Mb and really don't play much with it. I have though just manually (with GParted) created a fat blank partition and manually copied over the EFI stuff.
- Pete
O2 Jogglers running EFI Ubuntu / Squeezeplayer
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hawsey
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Re: External hard drive partitions.

Post by hawsey »

Thanks for the help guys but I think I am out of my depth possibly,
The main problem I have now is after a music scan in xbmc, mint is showing a almost out of memory box up.
What I now need to be able to do is put back the three partitions that were making mint boot from my hdd and then resize the one causing the memory issues
:-)
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pete
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Re: External hard drive partitions.

Post by pete »

Note that I did this as a hit or miss thing until it worked. I am no expert with BTFS; very far from it.

On my XBMC stuff DD was my friend; but it was slow going with BTFS. I did though utilize the all in one XBMC OS stuff rather than the Linux OS Mint running XBMC. All my media though is on the network NAS boxes. The XBMC OS though just barely fit on the 2Gb MMC; so I removed the stuff that I didn't utilize .

It was almost as if GPartd was locking the partition such that in itself it couldn't change it. I would do the info window, copy and paste each step, exit out of GPartec, open a terminal window and just type one command at a time.

So yeah you have to start with a blank slate. Easiest to just DD either the whole stick or each partition. Boot up in Linux on another stick. DD the partitions from the first stick and save them to a FAT32 partitoned USB stick. Then plug in your drive and dd the partitions you saved over to the non formatted hard drive. Then check the partitions and expand each one. You will get errors. Exit GParted; go back to it and check the partition and you will see the errors go away. (now I am remembering). I don't know though why I had to exit GParted; then load it up again. (thinking though it was related to using BTFS).

I did notice though what space it saids that I have and what I really have are two different numbers. I could not fix it such that the partition spaces (real) were the same size that BTFS said that they were.

If you google this issue there are pages and pages of corrections (fixes) each like a little receipe that works(worked) for the person doing it. I think that the partition methodology is done that way on purpose to provide better reslience. So really its like you have to build it from scratch such that i works the best.

I do have a DD image somewhere here of the XBMC OS build that I did for the Openframe2. Its working now fine for me. I also added the sources such that you can update it to Buzz's most recent XBMC stuff. I can post it in little pieces for download. It is less than 2 Gb in size.

Yeah here on my workbench I have three jogglers in pieces that I am playing with and using painters tape to keep them from shorting out. That and trying to remember what I have done to one over another one. The LCD screen and wires are propped up and it keeps falling down. So far far I haven't burned up anything; really these machines are built very well.
- Pete
O2 Jogglers running EFI Ubuntu / Squeezeplayer
OpenPeak Voip Telephony / Zigbee tabletops hardware modded with Seabios / RTC / Ethernet ROM edits / SSD drives running XPe for automation screens

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