On Wed, Dec 06, 2006 at 15:24:44 +0000, Alastair McKinley <amckinley03@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi everyone, > > I am currently running FC4 on my T43 laptop. I really want to upgrade > to FC6, however I have a couple of problems. Firstly, I dont have the > Bios password to boot a CD, my sysadmin has it, and if I want him to > do it I will have to wait some considerable time, and I want to > install it myself anyway! You should probably talk to him in any case. If you weren't trusted with the bios password, then it is probably best to check before upgrading. That said there are a couple of ways you might get around this. Usually you can reset the bios password by pulling the cmos battery and either waiting a while or jumpering a couple of pins provided for that purpose. This will reset other settings in the BIOS, so you will want to record them first (assuming you have read access to the bios). Some newer laptops have the bios password saved someplace other than the cmos memory and this trick won't work. Another approach is to do the install from the hard disk. You can make a grub entry for the boo image off the install disk and have your system to to that and then use an install from the hard drive. The full copy of the install image needs to be on a partition that isn't being overwritten by the install. I don't think the boot partition has this limitation. If you do this and things get foobar'd you might not be able to use your laptop until you can install off the CDs/DVD. > Secdonly, I have no free space on my disk. I have a 40G winxp > partition which I rarely use, I normally boot xp under vmplayer. This > partition has 31G free on it, does anyone know if partition magic or > some other tool can shrink an ntfs partition on the fly? (Remember no > bios password!) Will 25G or so be enough for a full FC6 install? I > keep most of my data on an external drive so that doesnt matter too > much. 25G is plenty for a full FC6 install. I don't know the answer to your resizing question.
