Shrinking 4 parititions on a new HP laptop (fwd)

[Julian H. Stacey]

Hi sysinstall at freebsd.org,
I posted similar to below to hackers Tue, 25 Oct 2011 02:26:05 +0200, but
no reply, so reformulating & adding info & hoping sysinstall@ may
have ideas what non BSD partitions one might encounter on a newly
purchased PC, & how best to remove before installing FreeBSD ?

I'm not asking for help on BSD commands, just want ideas what the
mess of 4 MS partitions might be, how best to move them aside.

A new purchased HP laptop (pavilion entertainment PC dm3 
has all 4 partitions occupied with MS (done by HP or shop)
(Label under laptop: Windows 7 Home Prem OA.)

I want to reduce MS to just 1 of the 4 fdisk partitions
& the other 3 for FreeBSD slices (2 boots of different
release of BSD & a large common UFS as I usual do).  

Normaly easy, previously I've found eg with XP, that new MS machines use
just a single Fdisk partition eg F1.  This PC is trickier, All 4 are used !

  MS `My Computer' says
  	Local Disk (C:)		176    Gig Free of 218	 GB
  	RECOVERY (D:)		  2.39 GB Free of   14.5 GB
  	HP_TOOLS (E:)		 92.5  MB Free of   99.1 MB
  
  Booting BSD-8.2 USB image: fdisk /dev/ad4
  	Partition 1	Sysid 7,NTFS etc		   199 M Active
  			start      2048	size    407552
  	Partition 2	Sysid 7,NTFS etc		223305 M
  			start    409600	size 457328640
  	Partition 3	Sysid=7,NTFS etc		 14866 M
  			start 457738240 size  30445568
  	Partition 4	Sysid 12,DOS/Win-95 32 bit FAT	   103 M
  			start 488183808 size    211312

F1 :	200 Meg
	As F2 is the main MS FS occupying most of disk.
	I tried fdisk setting active=2, 
	MS failed to boot then. Reverted back to Active=1 & MS booted again.

	I wonder what theyre using F1 for ?
		Repair base ?
		Or later to allow an encrypted F2 OS booting from another 
		smaller F1 OS first ?
		Or just to make it harder for people install BSD
		Linux or any non MS to find a free partition ?

	Can I merge F1 & F2 somehow ?

F2 = C:	Main MS 223 Gig
	I shrank the F2 main NTFS from 223 G to 65G &
	check rebooted MS & it still boots MS,
		From /usr/ports/sysutils/ntfsprogs using
	  	/dist/usr/local/sbin/ntfsresize -s 65G -v /dev/ad4s2
	  		adjusted bm_size: 1983648->1984000
	
	I'm not clear exactly what reduced number of sectors I should
	tell fdisk for F2.
		ntfsinfo -m /dev/ad4s2 | /dist/usr/bin/more
	        	sector size: 512
	        	cluster size 4096, volume size in clusters 15869139
		dc 15869139 4096 * p 64999993344
	Maybe I should allow 1K more than df shows when mounted,
	as per others below ?

F3 = D:	Recovery 15 G
	Hmm, this machibe was bought with legal MS inc licence, but
	no MS DVD - Sigh

	I could boot BSD from USB stick & tar this or F2 to another
	USB drive.  (if tar loses nothing on ntfs ?)

F4 = E 100 Meg partition
	7 Meg of HP manufacturer tools. I could copy with tar to a
	subdir in C: Not sure how I'll save paths for MS to execute,
	maybe an MS join command to subdir, if MS still have 'join'
	command (opposite of mount, effectively)

Curiously,
  dmesg announced number of sector for USB da0 but not for ad4, just:
  dmesg | grep ad4 # 238475 MB WDC WD2500BEKT UDMA100 SATA 3Gb/s
  
  cd /dist/sbin
  kldload /dist/boot/kernel/ntfs.ko
  mount_ntfs    /dev/ad4s1 /lap/1 ; du -s -k /lap/1	#     25 M
  mount_ntfs    /dev/ad4s2 /lap/2 ; du -s -k /lap/2	# 48.098 M
  mount_ntfs    /dev/ad4s3 /lap/3 ; du -s -k /lap/3	# 12,641 M
  mount_msdosfs /dev/ad4s4 /lap/4 ; du -s -k /lap/4	#    6.7 M of 101 M
  
  df
  	1Kblocks	Used		Avail	Capacity
  s1	   203775	   28815	174960	14%
  s2	228664319	43896379     184767940	19%	# 
  s3	 15222783	12708523       2514260	83%	# ./hp/
  s4	   101562	    6762	 94800	 7%	# ./$RECYCLE.BIN
  							# ./Hewlett-Packard
  
  Analysis with dc shows F1,F2,F3 fdisk partition entries each 2x512
  bytes more than df shows as size, but with F4, The DOS FS within
  the fdisk partiton is considerably smaller:
  
  	   203775 2 * p    407550	# fdisk shows    407552
  	228664319 2 * p 457328638	# fdisk shows 457328640
  	 15222783 2 * p  30445566	# fdisk shows  30445568
  	   101562 2 * p    203124	# fdisk shows    211312
  
  /dist/usr/local/sbin/ntfsresize -n -s 65G -v /dev/ad4s2

Cheers,
Julian
- -- 
Julian Stacey, BSD Unix Linux C Sys Eng Consultants Munich http://berklix.com
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