To format/partition/repartition win7 use the inbuilt disk-management: (works wonders) http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Can-I-repartition-my-hard-disk
I repartitioned my 600GB intex newly bought machine so I can now use some of its hard-drive to back-up my HFS+ (macintosh file system extended journaled, contents from 2005) and my old macintosh laptop drive. The first will enable me to reformat the HFS >> NTFS/FAT system so my window machines will be able to read it. Then I can put all files back into the NTFS drives if I wish. Or have the files on my intex.
The 2nd thing I am doing this afternoon is installing Ubuntu 11.4 (linux) onto my USB drive which I formatted yesterday, it’s a 8 GB historic sandisk pen drive I bought in 2006 in historic williamsburg. How to do it?
http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download
I installed the Universal USB installer Download the Universal USB Installer
This seems to have installed Ubuntu onto my USB except there was an error message. Let me check if I can boot linux from my sandisk.
NO I CAN NOT. I tried to boot my laptop from this USB with Ubuntu (not the intex computer where I downloaded but this does not matter they are both win 7, 32 and 64 bits respectively) But it can not boot. The error that showed up was “Data error in casper filesystem.squashfs” Broken file. I searched google for this error and this is a pretty known problem: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1654139
One recurring experince about such problems is these are pretty large files (700MB here) I tried downloading this and failed 4 times before I ended up downloading a 180MB ubuntu*.iso file without any error message (the above message comes when I tried to install it using the USB installer file) SO I thought I have probably done everything correctly. The lesson is when downloading large files one need to see if there are torrents available for the download.
In the above discussion the torrent file seemed to have been found broken. I confirm a similar experience. But don’t recall I chose another website or got around this problem via black-magic. But my toorent is downloading rightnow, it’s fast (50kbps average on my painful at times BSNL broadband) and I have downloaded 50% so far.
http://www.torrentcrazy.com/torrent/689604/ubuntu-11.04-desktop-i386.iso
When I finsh this I will try to run it via the above mentioned USB-installer again and see if I go through. are so many things that needs to be done before I am tech-savyy guy again. But my experience says something or other keeps on breaking. A disk crashes so you need to back up, and come across incompatibilities as often as technology keeps changing and so on. We need a vibrant online tehnology interaction and sourcing paradigm and to most extent I feel satisfied with such a scenario, over the last decade.
Happy nothings.
Manmohan
M Dash Foundation: C Cube Learning 