Installing SuSE-8.2 on a Dell Inspiron 5100 Notebook30/06/2003
The Dell Inspiron 5100 notebook is a fast laptop based on the Intel P4 processor. No major problems were encountered during the installation of SuSE Linux. However, the installation routines of SuSE 8v2 could not resize the NTFS partition. Some tricky procedures indicated below can be performed to shrink the NTFS partition and enable the pre-installed version of WinXP to be retained. After that, everything was relatively straightforward, and the final results - excellent.
The Hardware: 512 Meg RAM 30GB Ultra ATA Hard Drive 24X CD-RW/DVD Combo Drive Mobility Radeon 7500 Video card 15 inch SXGA+ display, 1400x1050 Internal Conexant D480 56K Modem Integrated Broadcom 440x 10/100 Network Card 2 USB ports 1 Firewire port 1 Svideo output 1 SVGA output Swann OptiGlo USB Optical Mouse Since the Dell Inspiron does not include floppy drive, serial port or parallel port, you can therefore through away your old HP printer, your old Kodak digital camera, your Logitech PS2 mouse, and all your floppy discs ! And buy again everything new. But then you will probably need some extra USB hub with 4 ports, because the 2 native ports of the laptop won't be enough.
The Software: Preparation If you set the Dell bios to boot from CDROM, and reboot the system with the SuSE installation disk
you will be given a default SuSE Linux that overwrites the pre-installed WinXP and uses the whole harddisk for Linux.
I wanted to retain the WinXP and squeeze the NTFS partition to make space available for Linux.
You can do this from Windows, if you have a recent PartitionMagic-7, but there is also now an open-source alternative.
The hard drive shows 3 partitions, a small one with some Dell utilities, a big one of 28GB with an NTFS file system used for Windows XP,
and another small one unused. Unfortunately the NTFS partition is seen as filled entirely
by Windows, with no free space at all. After a quick search on the Internet
it appeared that a way to resize this NTFS partition was to use a freeware called
Ntfsresize. Note The name of the hard drive on the Inspiron5100 is /dev/hdc2 (and not /dev/hda..). /dev/hdc1 contains the dell system utilities# fdisk -l /dev/hdc Only basically one partition, it's /dev/hdc2 and NTFS (OS/2 HPFS and Windows NTFS uses the same partition type, 7). Notice, it's also marked as bootable. The 3rd step is to run ntfsresize with the right options. This tells you how much space you could free. ntfsresize will warn you if it can't free any space. Also if you get too small value, to be worth/possible installing Linux on, you must defragment your NTFS.# ntfsresize -i /dev/hdc2 Once you have found out how much space you could have do a trial run... I chose to divide the disk in 2 equal parts of 14GB. If everything looks good, go on. If you get a different message or an ERROR: then don't proceed or try to force resizing!# ntfsresize -n -s14000M /dev/hdc2 ntfsresize v1.6.99 NTFS volume version: 3.1 Current volume size: 20390432768 bytes (20391 MB) New volume size : 14999996416 bytes (14000 MB) Scanning volume ... 100.00 percent completed Updating $BadClust file ... Updating $Bitmap file ... Updating Boot record ... The read-only test run ended successfully. Everything is ok... NTFS had been successfully resized on device '/dev/hdc2'. You can go on to resize the device e.g. with 'fdisk'. IMPORTANT: When recreating the partition, make sure you 1) create it with the same starting disk cylinder 2) create it with the same partition type (usually 7, HPFS/NTFS) 3) do not make it smaller than the new NTFS filesystem size 4) set the bootable flag for the partition if it existed before Otherwise you may lose your data or can't boot your computer from the disk!# ntfsresize -s14000M /dev/hdc2 The last step is to run fdisk, Repartition the disk. Warning! Basically this is the only error-prone step and several people made mistakes here forcing them to recover from backup! Below in order, we list the partition table, delete the 1st partition, recreate it with the same starting cylinder and using size 14000 MB as above, set the partition type to NTFS, mark it bootable as it was before. Then we print the partition table again to check everything is OK before writing it to disk # fdisk /dev/hdc Command (m for help): p Command (m for help): d Partition number (1-4): 2 Command (m for help): n Command action e extended p primary partition (1-4) p Partition number (1-4): 2 First cylinder (8-3648, default 1): 8 Last cylinder or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (8-3648, default 3648): +14000M Command (m for help): t Partition number (1-4): 2 Hex code (type L to list codes): 7 Changed system type of partition 1 to 7 (HPFS/NTFS) Command (m for help): a Partition number (1-4): 2 Command (m for help): p Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hdc2 8 1828 14627182+ 7 HPFS/NTFS Command (m for help): w The partition table has been altered! Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table. Syncing disks. Command (m for help):q Phew!! * Reboot to Windows to check everything is still alright. Now you should have unallocated disk space that all Linux distribution installations must be able to handle. Enjoy! When I rebooted Windows to make sure it still worked. It did, yes, it worked fine ! Linux Installation
I then dropped in SuSE CD #1 and restarted the machine.
I selected a typical config, keeping for later the installation
of extra software. The installation went off all right. The NIC card was correctly
detected. The SuSE installation was completed in 20 minutes, with its normal smoothness. Disk /dev/hdc: 30.0 GB, 30005821440 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 3648 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hdc1 1 7 56196 de Dell Utility /dev/hdc2 8 1828 14627182+ 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/hdc3 * 1829 3648 14619150 f Win95 Ext'd (LBA) /dev/hdc5 1829 1957 1036161 82 Linux swap /dev/hdc6 1958 3648 13582926 83 Linux Modem
The modem is a Connexant winmodem for which a HSF driver is available for Linux
www.linuxant.com/drivers/. I recompiled it from the tar.gz and it worked fine,
using kppp after setting up the modem using Yast. Other Hardware Sound and video are ok, but I could not have the 3d acceleration working. When setting it on, under Yast, Sax2 becomes unable to perform a test and the XFree86 server is frozen, forcing a reboot.The mouse uses optical technology. When active, the base and scroll wheel (which is also the middle button) illuminates, like a beautiful Christmas tree. It can be found there. Conclusion On the whole, installing SuSE Linux on a Dell Inspiron 5100 Notebook is relatively easy, and the result is good : excellent display, and very fast web browsing with Konqueror. linux-laptop.net
June 2003 by Bertrand Zidler
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