Hi. Sorry for the undescriptive topic, but there's simply no way to explain my situation in short.

Here's what happened.
I had a dual boot system with Windows XP and Gentoo. I was playing around with partitions under Windows with Partition Magic and basically messed up grub so I made the pc unbootable. I have some system recovery disk with my Acer notebook, but once I booted it it asked me whether I want the whole c partition wiped out... Well, no thanks. And so much for that attempt.
Next I booted Gentoo and installed it just to get Grub running. That went well, so I tried booting into Windows, but... Surprise surprise. That recovery disk has messed around with the boot information. I got a message "Windows 98 is loading..." and then some error. The thing is that on that bootable disk, there's Windows XP and not 98. So I have no idea what had gone wrong with this. I don't happen to have another XP cd in me right now, so I'm stuck there.
So I went on and tried installing Gentoo fully, so I can finish my work. I left it compiling KDE overnight (I know...). When I woke up I saw I had gotten an error message that there's no space left. Then I remember I had just enough space for a non-graphical use of Gentoo (about 2.6 GB, I think, maybe xfce will fit). So I was stuck there too.
I happen to have live cds of Ubuntu (5.10 Preview) and Wolvix. Launched Ubuntu and tried resizing the partitions, but that was no good. Said they're busy. Tried unmounting everything, said nothing's mounted.
Launched Wolvix and at least got access to my work files on the Windows partition (thank you, Wolvix!!), so at least my panic slightly subsided. Wolvix's GParted, however, cannot resize ntsf partitions.
The only thing I can think of doing is maybe move things from C: to D: (both ntsf) and then after all use my Acer recovery CD and format C... And create enough work for myself for a couple of days. The other alternative is to wait until I can get a windows xp cd from somewhere and use the Wolvix cd for whatever I can. It would be a pain, but maybe I'll manage.

I'm writing this, cause I'm far from being an expert at Linux and it seems to be the only solution right now. I've just tried the things I could think of, but I'm hopefull that there'll be someone who can give me a better idea of how I can fix this mess with as little damage as possible.
Thanks a bunch in advance and sorry for the long post...

Let me understand this clearly:

1.U hav a windows partition or mebbe two..C; and D: noth NTFS.
2.Im assuming Gentoo and Wolvix are both bootable Linux thingys ; somewhat Like Knoppix .Sorry...havent heard of them...

You are able to access files on C: and D: from your Linux OS...that right??

The problem is you have run out of disk space.The problem also is that you cant boot into Windows through GRUB .Is that right??

If you can boot into Linux thru a bootable CD and identify your partitions...

#fdisk -l

you will be able to see what is WIndows and what is Nonwindows...Partitions will be in the format /dev/hdaN...N is a number...your windows partitions will be marked as NTFS ; dont dream of touching them....You have to mess around with the NonWIndows partitions and delete them using the upgrade option on some Linux distro...do a minimal install that leaves you with free space to work...

Post back if u r confused ; have queries or if I have misunderstood..dont go on till ur completely sure of what ur duing...

All the best...n believe me ...Ive been dumb at times too..so ur not the only 1 in the world..

Arvind

Thanks for trying to help, but I think I figured it out today. Found that nice ntfsprogs utility that lets me resize ntfs partitions (my both Windows ones) without information loss. So I just stole some space from them and assigned it to the root partition. Had to rearrange things a but, reinstall this or that, but everything seems to be working out so far. Took me a while but it's great that I could find my way out of it without formatting anything.

And yeah, I have a pretty good idea which partition is Windows and which isn't... After all I was the one who created them.

Good stuff...well done on finding a way widout 4matting