Hawk Software

The holidays got me side-tracked for weeks, but I am going to continue my saga now.

The next step is system preparation.  The very first thing I do when I purchase or build a new system is to run Memtest86 on it to insure I will not have any memory problems.  This has saved me several times when I either purchased bad memory, or the motherboard used too aggressive  timing settings on a module.  It is also a tool I use on existing systems when they show any sort of flakiness, since memory errors can manifest themselves in all sorts of strange ways.

After I ran Memtest86 for two full passes, I booted into Windows for more testing, and here is where I took a wrong turn!  I downloaded Prime95 and loaded up all 4 AMD CPU cores overnight with no problems.  Of course, to download Prime95 I automatically installed Firefox first (I avoid browsing with Internet Explorer at all costs).   And I automatically uninstalled the Norton free trial and installed AVG for virus protection.

At this point I wanted to try freeing up some disk space for Ubuntu by shrinking the Windows 7 (Win7) partition from within Win7.  I have always relied upon Ubuntu to repartition  a drive, and it has always worked in the past, but I like looking at new ways of doing things.  My goal was to shrink the partition down to about 100GB so that I would have about 500GB for Ubuntu.  But there was a problem: the Win7 partition, which only had about 18GB of data, would not shrink below 280GB.  It seems when I installed the additional software it wrote some files way out in the partition, and Win7 will not move files during a shrink.  No problem I thought, I will just go ahead and install Ubuntu and let it move those files.

So, I boot up Ubuntu, perform the install (shrinking the Win7 partition to about 100GB), and then reboot back into Win7.  Or at least, I tried to boot into Win7.  Win7 complained about a dirty shutdown (as it should after Linux shrinks an NTFS partition).  But it crashed before getting to the desktop, even in safe mode. SIGH!  Good thing HP provides a simple system recovery.  So I recover the system, and this time before booting into Win7 I install Ubuntu and shrink the partition.  Ha! There is always more than one way to do things.

So I now boot into Win7 to go through the first-boot ritual again, and it crashes!  Win7 does not like the dirty flag set on an NTFS partition on the “first” boot. There is no safe boot on the first boot, and apparently there is also no chkdsk either to scan the partition and reset the dirty flag.  So, I run the HP system recovery again….

Third try!  Boot into Win7, and soon as the first boot was finished I shrunk the partition to about 100MB.

Now I installed Ubuntu and could finally begin to set up my virtual machines…