i couldnt find a better thread, so i stuck it here in newbie.

well, after 5 years of dual booting, im on cable internet and im ready to delete and resize my windows partitions. i still want a 10 GB Fat32 reserve so i can still use windows xp for games and adobe premiere. the other 30 GB will go all towards linux.
ive looked at qtparted, and it wont let me move my partitions. i have partitions as follows:
hda1 = ntfs (9GB)
hda5 = fat32 (10GB)
hda6 = reiser (20GB)
hda7 swap (about 50 MB)

what i want to do is delete the first two partitions, the NTFS and Fat32, and create a new Fat32 that is 10 or 11 GB. no matter what, im reinstalling windows, so dont worry about just resizing the first partition. ive looked at qtparted, but from what i tried, i could only delete the first 2 partitions, and i couldnt resize the hda6 partition so it would cover the previous 10GB fat32 partition.

any ideas on easy partitioning? should partition magic do the trick?

partition magic will do the trick. i don't get why you want to get rid of the first two partitions and then install windows on it and recreate the FAT32 with the same size you have now? wouldn't that be like deleting a sentence to write it out again?

Have

--> NTFS 9GB
--> Fat32 10GB

Willk create

--> NTFS 9GB for Windows XP i presume?
--> Fat32 10GB Multi OS Storage

Am I off the mark here?

Actually your drive is partitioned like:
hda1 - NTFS
hda2 - extended (size = sum of logicals i.e. 35GB)
hda5 - logical FAT32
hda6 - logical reiserfs
hda7 - logical swap

An extended partition is a container for logical partitions. So you see that you can not delete hda5 and hda1 and combine them into one partition.

I do not trust PM so backup all data and prepare for the worst.

yeah, everythings already backed up. i want to delete the first ntfs partition because i want to replace it from a 9GB NTFS to a 10.5 GB Fat32. i dont konw if oyu can convert ntfs to fat32, so i find it easier to just delete and create a new one. besides, windows needs reinstalled anyway, its all screwed up, as usual.

so PM would do it, any free software easier than FIPS? why wont qtparted do it?

Your correct you can not convert a NTFS partition back to FAT32 without losing data.

Don't know if parted will work because I have never tried to shrink an extended partition from its starting point. You will need to delete hda1 and hda5 and then shrink hda2 by moving its starting point. Now recreate hda1 and hda5.