Advanced(?) disk partitioning
 

Note: The same post has been posted on Gentoo Forums few days back.

Is it possible to split one primary partition in two (or more) partitions, without destroying the data on the entire hd? What I'd like to do is split the root (/dev/hda1) partition in two and have a separate /boot partition. All the data on /home (/dev/hda3) and /stuff (/dev/hda5) should be left intact, but the contents of the root (and swap) partition are useless so destroying them won't do any harm. /home I guess should be moved on the extended partition... Can this be achieved by merely modifying the partition table, or would it require moving the data around as well?

Here's my current partitioning scheme (all filesystems are reiserfs):

not too hard :-)

run fdisk /dev/hda, and remove hda1.

then create your boot partition, as /dev/hda1, as small as you'd like it to be (25MB maybe?)

create another partition (will have to be a secondary), which will be called /dev/hda6. use it as your root partition

press "w" and [enter] to save and exit, that's it