partitioning hard drive

[Guest pna]

I am dual booting XP and Mandrake 8.2. Prior to installing 8.2

I used partition magic 7 to create several different partitions

on my 40GB hard drive. In retrospect I should have made the partition'

where I have XP and the root partition for 8.2 larger. I have lots of free

space on my hard drive and would like to increase the size of

these partitions and decrease the size of one of the data partitions.

I know how to do this using partition magic. My question is

will this mess up my 8.2 installation (e.g. mount points)? I have limited experience

with linux.

Paul

[Guest JaseP]

If you use diskkdrake, it may be possible to re-size partitions by backing up the data and changing the partition size, then dumping the data back (driskdrake may do this automatically for you if you back up your partition you are looking to change and then unmounting the particular partition, resize, select mount point identical to the directory you are backing up, and then diskdrake may re-size for you). I have never tried this with a root partition though, and maintain seperate drives for Linux and Windoze (98 not XPee).

 

If you have a reasonably sized /home partition (as opposed to just a /home directory or a small /home partition), then you don't need to maintain the other partitions, you can simply re-install mandrake over top of itself, without re-formatting the /home partition. Create user accounts with the same names as you have in your existing /home partition and all your old user data will be intact. Of course, you must re-install all your old applications as well (make sure downloaded apps are backed up in the /home partition).

 

For Linux, I would suggest using some of that empty space by re-partitioning just that section with diskdrake. Give the new partition a mount point identical to the directory you want to increase in size and diskdrake will move the data over for you (or at least should). The space from the other partition will just be freed up. That should accomplish what you want as to the Linux side of things. Root partitions in Linux don't need to be huge. But /usr and /var partitions, if separate, should be of decent size.

 

With Windoze, you might consider setting up a second logical drive in a partition all its own. You would have to deal with an extra drive letter, but at least you'd gain more space.

 

PartitionMagic, I do not believe, has any ability to work with the newer file systems in Linux (EXT3, ReiserFS, etc.), just EXT2. So it is a somewhat limited tool. It's good for Windoze, just limited for Linux.

[Cannonfodder]

Unless you have done a lot of work, customization, software installations, its almost easier to just wipe your current Mandrake installation and start afresh. Destroy your old partitions and create new ones. You can back up any data or script files and restore them later. You can also backup with www.partimage.org that has a downloadable iso bootable CD. If you backup with this, you can restore the partitions into larger or same size partitions. Just can't restore into smaller partitions. I backup onto a second drive regularly.

[fuzzylizard]

I would have to agree with cannonfodder. If the Mandrake installation is fairly recent, wipe it and start over. And start by deleting all the linux partitions. This allows you to use diskdrake to create the correct size partitions to take advantage of the extra space on your drive.

 

One other thing to keep in mind if you are going to wipe your Mandrake install and your XP partition is NTFS, this provides an excellent time to create a FAT32 partition for sharing data between the two OSs. Wipe all the linux partitions, create a small FAT32 partition and then install Mandrake into the remaining free space.

[Guest pna]

Thanks for the advice. I was planning on upgrading to 9.0 soon

and I think I will repartition then. I already have a fat32 partition for

sharing files between XP and 8.2 and that has worked fine.