Restore dual boot after Windows installation + xfs issue

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Dear All,

good morning.
I have RHEL 7 installed on my Dell Workstation.
In this workstation I have 4 hard disks and 4 /home directories (/home1, /home2, /home3 and /home4).

I need to install Windows 7 for research requirements and I would like to shrink the /home4 partition and use part of the fourth hard disk
I plan to use GParted, even though I am having issues in shrinking the xfs partition.

First question: is there any special operation that I have to do to shrink an xfs partition without deleting it?

Second: when I have Windows installed, I will not be able to access RHEL anymore. Do You have some suggestions to
restore the dual boot? I use the GRUB2 boot loader.

Thanks in advance and my best regards

Giacomo

gf
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Responses

thomas.jones2@dodiis.mil's picture Guru 6435 points
20 April 2015 11:22 AM

Couple things:

For all its virtues, ability to non-destructively shrink is not one of XFS's. If you want the data currently on that filesystem, you'll need to:
1. Backup the filesystem
2. shrink the partition/volume it resides on
3. Re-create the filesystem
4. Restore the filesystem from your backups.

Before jumping through all the hoops to make your system dual-bootable, have you considered simply running Windows as a VM within your RedHat installation?

gf Community Member 25 points
20 April 2015 11:30 AM

Hi!

Thanks very much.
Unfortunately I have tried, but I have to use a 3D Scanner, which requires high performance video card.
I have a nVidia Quadro on my workstation, but the virtual hardware is not enough and the 3D scanner doesn't work.
I have to install a "native" windows system...

Thanks and best regards

G

thomas.jones2@dodiis.mil's picture Guru 6435 points
20 April 2015 11:49 AM

Bleah. Good luck.

gf Community Member 25 points
20 April 2015 12:00 PM

..... Thanks....
Do You have any suggestion to restore my grub loader?

thomas.jones2@dodiis.mil's picture Guru 6435 points
20 April 2015 1:03 PM

Windows tends to be "not dual-boot friendly". That is, Windows wants to be your only OS ...so, when you install it, it unsets the "bootable" flag from other partitions on your disk(s). Step #1 is to ensure that all of your partitions that should be bootable are marked bootable. Once you've done that, there's a number of good guides for using the GRUB tools for setting up dual-boot for Windows and Linux (also decent ones that detail configuring Windows' boot-loader to load Linux).

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