From dual-boot to Linux-only
 

For a few months now I have been using a dual-boot system (SuSE 9.1/WinXP). By now I'm using Linux most of the time and don't really have any use for XP anymore. So, I would like to remove it and allocate the space to Linux. I have one 80GB hard drive, witch has 3 NTFS partitions(swap,system,files) totalling ~70GB and two Linux partitions ~6GB total. As can probably guess I'm operating under pretty tight conditions in Linux. On the NTFS partitions there's abut 25 GB of free space and about 40 GB of music,films,documents, etc, which I definitely need to keep, so a clean install is probably not an option. So.. What would you suggest is the best way to deal with this situation? I was thinking of making a 20 GB partition from the free space I have, move as many files as possible there, format XP sys partition, add that to the 20 GB partition and so on. Is that feasible?

feasable, you can do some tricky stuff, if you are brave. you can get rid of all your xp partitions, then do a mkfs on the free space, then mv your /home dir into the new free space, then edit your /etc/fstab file to mount your new partition on /home. Be carefull, as messing with your fstab and partition allocation is somewhat risky.

I don't know of any tools off-hand that will resize an NTFS partition.

I'd definitely start by repartitioning the NTFS swap partition to something you can use to store files.

The easy option is if you can get the files you want to onto another medium; perhaps you have/could borrow an external hard disk or tape drive, or can burn them onto a CD. Then you can simply delete the ntfs partition and recreate it as reiserfs or ext3 or whatever. I'd then move all the files in /home into the new partition, mount the new partition as /home and restore the files from the other medium somewhere in your home directory.

Another option is to make some space on the Linux filesystems using things like strip and gzexe, as well as pruning old log files and bzip2 compressing larger documents. You may then squeeze a little extra space to use as a buffer while copying the files away from the filesystems that are being deleted.

By the way, if you're copying files all over the place, I'd keep a written record of what you've put where, just so you don't end up finding extra documents and movies on your hard disk for months on end.

Partition Magic 8 (windows) will resize an NTFS partition non-destructively.

But if you are just going to blow away Windows, I would do one of two things: kill all partitions and repartition and reinstall, or I would be adventurous and destroy the Windows partition and use Linux tools to resize and reallocate disk space.

Either way, dude, you need to back up all documents, data, music files, or whatever. Back it all up. That way you can play and destroy everything - you will learn a ton - without crying into your cereal ever morning for the next three days.

I would try the second and then do the first.

i got a jumpdrive usb stick and copied my /home over to it, they are pretty cheap at walmart. I have a jumpdrive sport, only thing i had to do to it was format it as vfat under winblows xp (but i may not have had to, i later learned)