How can I partition Linux? w/o windows.

Trinity22 · 08-20-2003, 03:40 PM

Is there anyway of paritioning without windows? As in keep the distro I am on now and have some space to try a new distro while still having this one in case i fubar something.

i've been doing searches but the only thing i'm finding is having some version of windows on the computer so you can use partition magic. is that the only option?

thanks for any assistance (links, anything) on this,
trinity

acid_kewpie · 08-20-2003, 03:53 PM

partition magic? i'd never use that POS....

cfdisk should be able to do what you want.... but if you just want to try out other distros in the space where windows was, then you won't need to change a thing.... well actually you'll need to change the partition type from fat32 to linux native in fdisk / cfdisk etc... (but your installer may well do this for you anyway) other than that, not a thing... share the swap partition that you've already got and that's it really...

Trinity22 · 08-20-2003, 03:56 PM

well i don't have any version of windows....that's the thing. just running jamd linux right now, but i'd like to have that to rely on while trying slackware or something like that. so cfdisk? is that a program or command? is there a tutorial somewhere I should be looking for?

thanks,
trinity

wr3ck3d · 08-20-2003, 04:45 PM

I don't think fdisk can change partition size. Like if you have 1 hard drive and the whole thing is partitioned you will need something to split the partitions up.

Post back with better info on your situation. Hard drive size, current partitions etc.

lyle_s · 08-20-2003, 05:43 PM

I've had great success with GNU Parted available at http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/.

I couldn't figure out how to make it work with partitions with reiserfs filesystems, but I didn't try that hard either.

Lyle

Trinity22 · 08-20-2003, 06:16 PM

I have a 40GB hard drive and my /home/trinity directory is taking up 1.6GB. I'm not sure how to figure out how much the whole linux system is taking. the only os i have on my hd right now is jamd linux.

i dunno what other information would help.

trinity

lyle_s · 08-20-2003, 06:23 PM

Run the command:

df -h

at the command line.

It will give you a report of how large your partitions are and how much you have stored in each one.

Lyle

Trinity22 · 08-20-2003, 07:12 PM

thanks lyle_s, this is what i get.

[trinity@dhcp-1648-7 trinity]$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2 38G 4.0G 32G 12% /
/dev/hda1 46M 9.4M 34M 22% /boot
none 504M 0 504M 0% /dev/shm
[trinity@dhcp-1648-7 trinity]$

trinity

da_zombie · 08-20-2003, 07:51 PM

Parted is gr8! also if u have mandrake 9.1 disk just run that while booting n resize ur partition...n i think it wont destroy ur data!

lyle_s · 08-20-2003, 08:29 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Trinity22
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2 38G 4.0G 32G 12% /

There you go; you could shrink /dev/hda2 and create some new partitions in the resulting free space for a new distro, all with parted.

Of course the usual back up everything warning applies.

Lyle

Trinity22 · 08-20-2003, 08:51 PM

is there a tutorial on that somewhere, or what are the steps. sorry to be a pain in the ass, but i'm anal about instructions.

trinity

andrewlkho · 08-20-2003, 08:59 PM

Well, anality aside, just follow da_zombie's instructions [actually, I've just realised that they don't apply]. Install GNU Parted onto your computer, then use it to resize some partition to free up space for your new installation.

Trinity22 · 08-21-2003, 08:53 PM

okay, well i'm trying to download parted. the readme says to download from the bootdisk folder, the partboot and partroot. except that i'm unable to download from the bootdisk folder (i've tried several ftp locations) and the old stable folder doesn't have the files in it like the bootdisk does.

any thoughts as to what to do?

trinity

lyle_s · 08-21-2003, 10:33 PM

You might want to wait a bit. The GNU project ftp server was hacked and they're still working on making sure nothing untoward was done to any of the files, including the Parted files.

Lyle

Trinity22 · 08-22-2003, 11:56 AM

thanks for the information, hope it doesn't take too long, i'd really like to partition soon

trinity