Spy der Mann's Journal: A proof of the robustness of Linux vs. Windows

Imagine this. Your hard drive consists of various partitions. And you need to resize your C: partition because it can't hold on more data.

Can you do it in windows and make sure everything's OK? You need special (and expensive) programs. The easiest way is to backup your data, wipe everything and reinstall from scratch.

But with Linux, you can do it for free and in a couple of hours - and without having to worry about updating a whole gig of service packs and upgrades.

So, what did I have to do? Well, I had to move some partitions around to expand my /usr partition from 7gigs to 30gigs.

but after /usr, there was the /var partition. And after /var, there was /home. And after /home there was a huge 250GB empty partition.

So what did I do? I created a partition by deleting the 250GB one, and creating a 50MB one.

Then rebooted... whoops, Linux wouldn't boot. I had made the mistake of mounting the new (unformatted) partition to the name of an existing partition. The kernel got confused about this, and forced me to do a recheck - No problem, instead, I booted from the CD, formatted the just created partition, and rebooted from the HD again. It booted again.

Then, using the "cp -a" command, I moved everything from /home to /home2 (by using cp -a /home/* /home2).
But before rebooting, i edited /etc/fstab, and renamed the partition /home2 to /home. I renamed /home to somethingelse. Then rebooted, wiped the somethingelse partition and repeated the process with /var and /usr.

(I wonder if I really had to reboot - perhaps there was some command to unload all the partitions and reload them again, but I just got lazy and didn't find out). /usr was more tricky, because that was the partition I had to resize. Rebooted from the LiveCD again, and resized the partition. In case something went wrong, I could restore the backup that I had made by typing "cp -a /usr/* /home/usr" beforehand. I would only type "cp -a /home/usr/* /usr" and ta-da.

So, using the Admnistration Center, I enlarged the /usr partition, and rebooted.

Did everything work fine? Yes, it did! A nice thing of Linux is that you can access the file system from a Live CD and play as you like with the partitions. Now, try doing the same thing I did, but in Windows.

And of course, in case of a brute-force reinstall, your /home directory is still safe. And it'll still be home. Have you ever tried to move the "Program Files" directory from C: to D: ? First, you have to edit the registry, then do a search and replace, reboot, etc. But if you have to install from scratch, Windows will INSIST to put program files in C:. And let's not even talk about My Documents.

I'm in no way a Linux hacker / expert, but as I begin to know Linux more, I realize the inherent faults that Windows has. Before I switched, I considered ReactOS my #1 choice instead of Windows. But now I'm starting to have my doubts. I no longer appreciate the file system or kernel that Microsoft has imposed on its users. Linux is more universal than Windows. Even if Microsoft has 99% of the Market Share.

And how can prove it? Well, you can't boot Windows from a USB drive, can you? :)