Hi

i'm sure this question must have come up, but of the 10 posts on partitioning i read i didn't find anything useful, so bare with me and i'm sorry if i ask something trivial.

i dual boot win xp with debian, 20 GB drive, i set up debian in such a way that hda1 is xp, hda2 is shared fat, hda3 is debian boot, and hda4 is a a logic volume with seperate partitions for /usr, /home, /, /var, /tmp, and another shared fat (however windows will only recognize one of the two, but that's besides the point)

Anyways, I'm trying to install freebsd 5.3 on this old box, and i partition magic'ed it in xp and i suppose because of all the complications the program cannot start itself, saying an error 117 or other. So here's the question:

How do you move all the data in my windows xp partition to the beginning using some partition tool so i can squeeze out another 4 GB or so from this ntfs partition? Being a newbie and having erased the entire harddrive before (with fdisk), I'd like some advice/guidance before I start again.


Thanks a bunch in advance!

I don't think your setup will work because freebsd must be installed on a primary partition and from your post, you don't have any left, i.e. your four primary partitions are already being used. Shrinking hda1 won't change the fact that hda1, hda2, hda3 and hda4 are being used. Your going to have to clear out one of your primary partitions to make room for freebsd.