Hello,

I'm dual booting with two hard drives:
hda -120GB runnning WinXP
hdb - 80GB running Mandriva 2005 LE

I want to back up my data files onto hdb. Currently I'm using only 10% of the /home partition. So I figured I can resize the it and allocate about 40GB to Windows. I've read about GParted and DiskDrake but before I attempt to use either of them I'd like to know if what I'm attempting to do is wise. Can DiskDrake convert unallocated free space to NTFS and will Windows recognise it after rebooting.

Thanks in advance,
NewLeaf.

well you can use resize2fs and such like to shrink file systems, but there's no logic in converting blank space to NTFS. doesn't really make sense. what you'd do is leave unpartitioned space at the end of the drive, and then in windows create a partition in that space as normal. note though that hdb is not going to be a single partition, and you may have trouble if the "free" space you wish to have is in the middle of the devices. an "fdisk -l /dev/hdb" would be useful to see what the structure actually looks like.

Thanks for your reply. I used GParted and was able to easily reclaim the space I wanted. GParted provided a means of resizing and converting the partion to ntfs and did so without fault. The whole procedure took under ten minutes and I now have a 23G linux partition and a 57G windows partion (which windows recognises as drive G: )

These are the before and after results of fdisk /dev/hdb:
-NewLeaf

You were fortunate with the arrangement of your partitions.
Keep Chris' warning in mind for future attempts when things may not go so well. Simple example - if they had all been primary partitions, what you attempted would not work.

Are you sure of that? You can have 4 primary partitions; OP had 2. If all 4 had been primary partitions, then clearly OP would be out of space in the partition table. Equally clearly, an attempt to shrink his second primary partition (hdb2) which is hosting extended partitions would have led to some really bad consequences.

But if, for instance, OP had 3 primary (and no extended) partitions, then made space between, say, the first and the second partition, I *think* that the space would have been allocated as hdb4 in the partition table, even though its location on the HD is between hdb1 and hdb2.

Poor choice of words on my behalf. I meant:
"Simple example - if your original configuration had been all primary partitions, what you attempted would not work."

Always be careful when messing with multiple partitions though. I have once ruined a computer doing that (wouldn't boot), had to wipe both XP and the Slackware that was on it at the time. Turned out to be a blessing in disguise, but that's another story.