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I have XP on a 30 gig hard drive. Is it possible to set up a new partition without having to reinstall windows or anything?


Note: I'm planning to set up a dual-boot with mandrake linux and XP. Anyone have any suggestions as to how much space I should devote to each partition?

Shinova wrote:I have XP on a 30 gig hard drive. Is it possible to set up a new partition without having to reinstall windows or anything?


Note: I'm planning to set up a dual-boot with mandrake linux and XP. Anyone have any suggestions as to how much space I should devote to each partition?

If I remember right, unlike FAT16/FAT32 (DOS, Win9x/ME), NTFS (NT 3.5 - 5.1) doesn't appreciate sharing a physical drive with other partitions (especially non-NTFS.) So, in other words, the only way to have a dual-boot setup in WinNT (2000/XP) is to have two hard disks.

And, as a nod to the old MS-DOS systems, this is my 640th post. (For those of you who might be babes in the woods, there was a day where the maximum amount of RAM you could stick in a PC was 640k.)

If you have a single HD and you want to create a new partition I would use Partition Magic. It is designed for this kind of work. However, save any critical files first before you mess with partitions!

TrailerParkJawa wrote:If you have a single HD and you want to create a new partition I would use Partition Magic. It is designed for this kind of work. However, save any critical files first before you mess with partitions!

Jawa is 100% right. Make a backup, and then use Partition Magic to RESIZE your XP partition to, say, 25GB, (DO NOT MOVE IT!! Just resize) and leave the last 5GB for the Linux partition. One last note: PM does NOT like compressed files on NTFS partitions. Make sure you UNCOMPRESS all compressed files and folders if you use NTFS. Hope this helps.

GrandMasterTerwynn wrote:
If I remember right, unlike FAT16/FAT32 (DOS, Win9x/ME), NTFS (NT 3.5 - 5.1) doesn't appreciate sharing a physical drive with other partitions (especially non-NTFS.) So, in other words, the only way to have a dual-boot setup in WinNT (2000/XP) is to have two hard disks.

You remember wrong. I have win2k on a drive with about 6 or 7 partitions and it works fine. Isn't even the primary partition, that's win98.

DO NOT INSTALL LINUX UNLESS YOU HAVE A WINDOWS XP CDROM!!! (NOT A RECOVERY DISK) OR CAN "AQUIRE" ONE!

Due to stupid Microsoft anticompetitive practices, a lot of computers do not come with the CD, rather they come with a recovery disk which ignores partitioning or a recovery partition which when nuked makes it impossible to reinstall windows. Maybe you can burn the recovery partition to a CD? Stupid M$ anticompetitive practices. Spanky will yell at me for bitching against a legitimate complaint, in oh say about less than 5 hours. Maybe Einy will "give" you a CD.

Partition Magic costs 60USD, so I don't suggest using it. You can use ntfsresize to resize your partition, but it's in beta, so I suggest backing up data that you cannot reinstall. Find it here: http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html
The Mandrake 9.1 beta has the NTFS resizer built into the installer into a nice GUI. For the NTFS resizer I recommend you back up every irreplacable file to CD-Rs

For booting look here:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/H ... WinNT.html
or here:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/H ... oader.html

I recommend partitioning your hard drive into 4 pieces-

1st Partition- NTFS- 10-GB- For Windows and Windows programs, games, etc. that can only be used on Windows

2nd Partition- FAT32- 9.5-10GB- For files, MP3s, images, movies, P0R|\|, Games whose files can be used under both Windows and Linux- Unreal for example, etc. Basically stuff that's not OS-specific. You can possibly place the swapfile here too, ommiting the swap partition

3rd Partition- Ext2 or Ext3 (Ext3 recommended)- 10GB-Linux and it's program files, games, etc. that only run on Linux.

4th Partition- Linux Swap Partition- .5GB- Don't need this if you have a lot of memory or have the swapfile on partition 2.

I think you also have to recompile your kernel after installation to read NTFS partitions under linux. Write support to NTFS is dangerous, so do not use it. For reading/writing to Ext2/3 from Windows you can download Explore2fs at:
http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/explore2fs.htm

Ext2fsd is another alternative, but it's in alpha. Get it here:
http://www.tuningsoft.com/index.htm

You may skip partition 2 if you think it's ok to simply copy files from one filesystem to another, and modify it there, then reboot from the other OS and copy it back. That's kind of tedious and wasteful of disk space however.

TrailerParkJawa wrote:If you have a single HD and you want to create a new partition I would use Partition Magic. It is designed for this kind of work. However, save any critical files first before you mess with partitions!

That's what I did on both my systems. Just used FDISK (good ole DOS) to create two disticnt partitions, and now both are dual boot systems (my desktop being Win XP/98, and my notebook being Win 98/SuSE Linux).

In response to Pu, I have an XP cd.


And everyone, thanks for your input. I'll take them under consideration.

Geez, you people actually shelled out 60$ for PM?

Damn that is overpriced anyways for a one time use utility.

Pu-239 wrote:Geez, you people actually shelled out 60$ for PM?

Damn that is overpriced anyways for a one time use utility.

What does PM do that FDISK (which is free) doesn't do? I've only ever used FDISK, and I've never had problems.

Nondestructive partition resizing, which there are free programs that have most of the functionality. Only good thing I see in PM is the GUI, and who needs a GUI on something you use on a rare basis. Besides you should back up anyways, so rebuilding the partition table should'nt be a problem.

Pu-239 wrote:Nondestructive partition resizing, which there are free programs that have most of the functionality. Only good thing I see in PM is the GUI, and who needs a GUI on something you use on a rare basis. Besides you should back up anyways, so rebuilding the partition table should'nt be a problem.

When you have 300+ Dells with Windows to take care of PM comes in handy now and then. $60 bucks is not a big deal. Working in the GUI is a little easier so it is worth it IMO.

Windows 2000 makes some of the need for PM go away because Disk Management can do some of the functions, but in a 98/NT only environment I find it usefull.

Also, Shinova does not have a lot of experience so I would not recommend FDSK cause it is too easy to kill the wrong thing.

TrailerParkJawa wrote:

Pu-239 wrote:Nondestructive partition resizing, which there are free programs that have most of the functionality. Only good thing I see in PM is the GUI, and who needs a GUI on something you use on a rare basis. Besides you should back up anyways, so rebuilding the partition table should'nt be a problem.

When you have 300+ Dells with Windows to take care of PM comes in handy now and then. $60 bucks is not a big deal. Working in the GUI is a little easier so it is worth it IMO.

Windows 2000 makes some of the need for PM go away because Disk Management can do some of the functions, but in a 98/NT only environment I find it usefull.

Also, Shinova does not have a lot of experience so I would not recommend FDSK cause it is too easy to kill the wrong thing.

So? Besides command line tools can be scripted and automated easily. Also I thought it wasn't legal to use it on multiple computers.

So? Besides command line tools can be scripted and automated easily. Also I thought it wasn't legal to use it on multiple computers.

Ive never looked into scripting command line tools for partitioning because there has always been a copy of PM around. And for Shinova I still would not recommend it.

Im not sure on the licesing, my copy is retail and not OEM. You could be right.

Can fdisk resize an NT partition without messing anything up?

jegs2 wrote:What does PM do that FDISK (which is free) doesn't do? I've only ever used FDISK, and I've never had problems.

Obviously, you plan ahead. For those who don't, PM is good for trying to change your setup after the fact.

Shinova wrote:Can fdisk resize an NT partition without messing anything up?

No.

Pu-239 wrote:Maybe Einy will "give" you a CD.

I have a Win98 ISO and a Win2K ISO, both confirmed fully functional. Plus a CD Burner. And a hell of a lotta blank CD-Rs... You can see where this is going. My contact info is on the buttons at the bottom of this post. Leave your checkbooks at home, you're not gonna need 'em!

A little update:


I managed to get my hands on Partition Magic 8 and did some resizing, partition-creating, and got a dual-boot machine going.




Except that I also thought resizing a Linux partition was a smart thing to do and tried that to give more space to my shared folder.

Needless to say, I nuked my whole OS structure, and when I get home (I'm in library right now) I'm going to reinstall XP. don't know about Linux. We'll see.

well while you are at it use fdisk to make a 10 GB partition for XP. Then use the mandrake installer to make the other two.