HD Install :: Swap files, Partitions, and terror

When running from a LiveCD, you lose everything only if you want to. The makers of DSL made sure that you have the option to save your work and any custom settings you picked for the programs you use. You can make use of the backup system through the "filetool.lst", that is essentially a list of things you want saved for next sessions. This should work with your FAT32 disk; no need to format anything. It will just create the file "backup.tar.gz" on the disk. This is described in the documentation displayed immediately after you boot-up DSL.

You can also "mount" that FAT32 (a.k.a. vfat) hard disk and read/write on it while in DSL. It is "unmounted" by default (as with other Linux LiveCDs) to prevent you or any nasty programs from accidentally modifying anything on it.

Thank you for all in info, I will try to make a seperate file for working on DSL and saving to the HD. No one said life was going to be easy, but they didn't tell me it was damn near impossible!
beekeers

You could use a program like [partition magic] to resize your XP partition and give yourself maybe 150-200 megs of either fat32 or ext2 partition behind it for your "backup" stuff to go...ext2 would be better as the XP wouldnt even see the partition...

Frugal as well would be good...cause then you could do a 400-500Meg ext2 partition and run it as "live cd" directly from your harddrive...however use a windows based partition resizer to change up the XP, cause trying to resize ntfs with linux will bork a system in a hurry!

Brian
AwPhuch

FYI,

I was able to resize my NTFS partition by using KNOPPIX livecd and QTPARTED.

I needed to defrag my Windows partition before rebooting into KNOPPIX and starting QTPARTED but otherwise it was a pretty straightforward task.

original here.