500 G is a ton of space. What are you trying to do? You may be able to compress and delete and defrag it down a bit or use third party partition program.

Debian gives you an option and then warns you if you take the time to read carefully. You can still make simple mistakes.

You do have a very good option.

Did you consider running virtual machines? Trust me on this. Your system would run 20 or 30 all at one time easily. In production I'd suspect most people could run pretty heavy 3 or more VM's on that system. There is little downside to running virtual machines. They really are an easy way to run multiple OS's.

I have g-parted live cd, I was going to compress and try to shrink again but I don't think it will let me do it with device manager(shrink partition). If I use g-parted I can shrink down and if I lose part of os I can reinstall on the resulting partition. I figured out the other problem by installing an old ide cd so I didn't get the warning message on boot, so knowing that was the case I removed it, not too worried about message. I need to read the manual for my mb and see if I can disable ide, in fact, I know that I can disable, just want to know what effect it would have.

I'm here to learn all that I can,I've only got almost a year into seeing what makes them tick. I would like to do that also, but, with so much information available, I think I need to focus on completing something. I have been jumping around from subject to subject, install after install and learning alot and still haven't gotten it all right. The good thing is that I have an extra hdd and other machines to use as test subjects. Yes I am going to try it after I get 1 good install(complete).

I just used gparted-live-cd it worked like a charm, no file loss. It actually checked file system before & after.

Thank you Jeffro for putting something else on my mind(vm). I read a little on it and I liked what I read.

Original questions:
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It hadn't loaded the drivers or the motherboard update drivers for windows, eventhough it comes pre-flashed.

3. I have 2 sata hard drives both are 1Tb, When dual booting am I better off having os on separate drives?

It doesn't matter being that if you install a second os it will see the other as long as you don't overwrite the partition that other os resides on. With grub2 after booting os grub update will locate other os.

I thinking about doing my dual-booting the 1st hdd after resizing if I boot from disc doesn't debian see the active partition? If so all I would need to do is load to free space, which leads to next question at the end you're prompted to load grub or grub-legacy, would either of these work with another os?

This was the case on a triple-boot system which had windows, debian and ubuntu, where debian and ubuntu although on separate drives shared swap. As for resizing partition G-parted did the trick, I haven't done anything with AMD 1095, Everything that I'm saying is being tested on emachine
t1221 512mb ram 1-30G &1-40G hdd. I'm almost ready.