Hi,
I have three partitions on my hard drive. The first one has the OS (slackware 9.1), the second one the home directories. (the third one is the swap partition)
Is it possible to create a third partition for a additional distribution (debian, for testing issues)? If yes, how do I do this?
It is important that none of my existent partitions are touched.

if you have the room on your drive you can add another partition and drop another distro in it. From there you cn either use the same /home partition you're already using or just mount it under the new /home directory your distro will create in the new /

then you'd need to tell your bootloader (lilo or grub usually) about the new partition.

I have enough space.
Which program should I use? cfdisk?
I fear losing all my data (a backup would devour too much cd-rw )

so you have some free, unpartitioned space on the drive then?

If so you should use whatever partition tool you feel most comfortable with. With fdisk or cfdisk you would have to explicitly delete partitions to do any damage so you should be safe there and then you should be able to add the new partition without any warnings. As long as you don't mess with the current partitions you'll be fine. If you mess something up with the bootloader along the way - don't panic - your partitions are still there, you'll just need to find a boot CD or floppy to start your system and mount the partitions.

Other things to watch out for... your boot loader will need to be able to see the entire disk. (Old versions of lilo could only see up to 1024 cylinders). You will also have to be careful about _which_ lilo configuration will be in charge (your current one or the new one you will install with your next distro. You may want to get comfortable using 'chroot'.

Most importantly you'll want to reconsider the whole ordeal if your data is that important and not backed up.

Yes, there is a problem.
All my hard disk is already partitioned and in use.

Mmm. I wouldn't mess with repartitionig drives with data on them, expecially since you're not backed up. There are a few tricks you can try with shuffling data from your /home partition to /, but again - you're not backed up and I can't recommend it.

Fortunately, I have found partition magic 8 on my win2k drive. This worked properly.

Thx a lot, but there are surely more questions to come...