I think I am just about ready to ditch Windows on my work laptop once and for all.

I've been running a dual boot system for a little while but have started to use Linux more and more as daft as it sounds, it is easier to move around between NT domains using Linux and samba than NT, especially with DHCP. Now I have ironed out mounting drives on the NT servers so I can actually write to them I now only have to figure out printers and reclaim some disk space (with "only" a 5gb drive in total I am a bit lacking in that area).

From a windows perspective my next question sounds pretty dumb, but then I am a newbie and this is the newbie corner
Essentially it concerns reclaiming the half of the hard disk that Win2k currently sits on and how this integrates into the linux fs (I am still getting my head round this bit) that already exists.

In windows I'd just delete the relevant partitions (if necessary) create a new partition and format it and voila a d: drive. Is the process pretty much the same under linux?

all you need do is use a program like fdisk of cfdisk to change the type of the partition to a linux naive one such as ext3 or reiserfs, and then format it usings mke2fs etc... then just mount it whereever you wish.

you may want to use that partition as /home, /usr or something in which case it's pretty straight forward, i've explained it a fair few times here... have a search.

Cheers for the info, having done a search, the following post appears to contain pretty much all the information and links to other resources anyone could ever want to know about disks/partitions under Linux.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ight=partition