I ended up booting into Vista in order to install Ubuntu 10.01 LTS so that I could defrag the Windows partition in order to steal about 20 GB from it. The partition editor in Vista said there was only 9 GB free when the usage said there was 90 GB free. That may be due to stopping the defrag step which pushes data to the end of the drive. The downside is that defrag takes FOREVER.
Rather than risking hurting the NTFS that this OS uses, I want Vista to shrink the filesystem. I didn't trust the partition handling tools in the Ubuntu 10.04 install CD, although it worked fine as a live CD, its install options were too limited to allow me to either reuse an existing partition or use unused space in a partition. So I am trying to create unallocated space, about 20 GB, for a new partition.
This is being written in NVu under Vista. I also checked out my site pages with Sarafi 5 and had already seen that they display acceptably using a version of Mozilla around 3.6. I was a little surprized to not find IE in the list of available files. I need to test my web site on what is still the most commonly used browser, even though I snarked yesterday that prople who don't know how to install Mozilla in Windows are probably not interested in my site.
Again on Vista, found IE icon on tool bar and pointed to my hosted web pages. Most of the features of CSS3 are not available, but the pages render so they can be read. I am not sure what version IE came with Vista. It may be IE5, and the fall backs are not unacceptable for what it doesn't support, or rather what I don't support, for I could add IE dependancies into my style, but as the pages do render I might not bother, again Firefox on Windows does a much better job. Edditing this in emacs back on Linux, added more style.
Which is both good and bad news. If you right-click on the Console shortcut in Vista you can open the console with Administrator priveleges after you give the password. Then running "defrag.exe C: -a" evaluates the fragmentation of the volume. It said that the volume didn't need defragmentation. There are more than 80 GB free, the volume is a little less than half full, so I can possibly steal the 20 GB I want for Ubuntu 10.10 Server or Ubuntu 10.1 LTS desktop. The remaining issue is that Vista partitioner would only let me take 9 GB of it and I don't know why. Defrag said that the largest free extant is 18 GB so what I don't know is whether defrag means that the disk space is contiguous or not, and I don't know if the Linux installers are smart enough to claim free space without clobbering parts of the filesystem that is there. When I did this before booting windows after slicing the disk complained about loose ends but did not fail to get the filesystem. I don't have much on that volume I couldn't recreate and there isn't much there of personal files I need to have. I could chance it and slice the disk for yet another Ubuntu Install.
I checked to be sure that an error I saw yesterday when I booted the Ubuntu installed within the Vista volume didn't prevent that OS from booting after I wasted all day yesterday with dgragmenting the volume. It turns out that grub2 was perfectly happy, although I knew that the latest kernal available there does not boot, so I skip down to the next version. The message is about missing stuff on /dev and the system does boot into Gnome just fine. The error appears to have to do with something Compiz needs, and doesn't seem to affect what I do on that install.
A remaining issue is that repartitioning a drive could cause Grub2 to get confused if its config is not checked and reinstalled. Running a Ubuntu install should do this automatically and get the config file and the boot records correct as I have already seen. The challenge is that I'd like to reclaim an underused partition, /dev/sda3, and grow it into the space taken from the C: drive for Vista, /dev/sda1. If I could erase what is there with a new install grub2 will get things right.