Hi,
I really want to apologise if this has already been asked but I did a search and couldn't really find what I was looking for, I tried the mandrake site and still the same so please just humour me as I am completely new to this.

I currently have Windows XP installed in a single partition which takes up the whole drive. I defragged the drive and ran chkdsk to make sure there were no bad files/clusters/sectors etc. All went fine. Then knowing that makdrake can resize NTFS I booted off the cd and started the installation. The drive I am installing on is 20gb and windows+mystuff take approx 9, so i was going to allow 11 for windows and install mandrake in the remaing 7 (i know thats not 20 but the drive is not exactly 20gb....etc). So sure enough went through the installation to the paritioning bit. Normally at this point I would say custom resizing, resize the windows down 11 and then get the free space auto-allocated by mandrake. But in trying to resize windows it would only go down to about 18gb. Now i guess thats because windows has written stuff to the end of the drive. So the other option is to use the option "Install in free space on windows partition" but how much space does mandrake allocate to itself as like i said i still want 2gb of free on the windows partition?

Many thanks for any replies and once again sorry if this has already been covered.

s0

Mandrake installation does allow you to re-size Windows partitions, but doesn't do it very well. I've had this problem in the past, too. I think it will only take up the part of disk on which there is no data written at all, or something along those lines. If you can, you should consider getting something like Partition Magic. You can always manually allocate space to Mandrake partitions, but you wouldn't know what you are overwriting. BTW, you should back up your Windows stuff before doing any of this.

I used VCommunications' System Commander as my bootmanager in the past. While I did migrate to GRuB, I've kept the SysCommander floppies around because they have a very good partition manager. The latest version does NTFS, FAT16, FAT32, ext2, ext3 and I think XFS. I don't think they've added ReiserFS yet, but my version is about 6 months old so it may be there now. Never had a problem with it and it runs off of a floppy.

stunter

Although I haven't used it to resize NTFS partitions, knoppix has a very nice graphical partition manager. It claims to support resizes of NTFS but I still stick with my partition magic since I have it and I know it will work. I can't remember the name of it for the life of me though. Anywho, if you have a broadband connection I'd recommend downloading knoppix as its a great recovery tool for ANY OS, especially now since it includes captive NTFS for full write support.

I'm having the same problem. I tried Partition Magic but I could not find a functioning free version, and I don't feel like paying $70 for it.

Knoppix does have a partition software - it's called Qparted or something like that. I havent tried it yet, but this is the alternative I'm considering.

Note on Partition Magic - stay away from the "Demo" versions - they are nonfunctional showcase pieces - they do not commit changes to the disk!

Hi,
Thanks for the replies everyone.

Yeah from what I have read if you choose to install in windows free space it will do the job but doesnt allow you to chose how much space is allocated to windows, therefore i think once you install mandrake you would have to free up space on the windows parition before you could do anything more with windows.
So it looks like partition magic is required to make the windows partition smaller but leaving some spare space (cos PM will move the data to take up slack in the middle of the windows parition) and then leave the free space unallocated so mandrake can go on.

If anyone does have any more ideas then shout cos its always good to know other options - like other PM type software that handles NTFS (knoppix, etc).

Once again thanks,
s0

Just in case anyone is still interested I used Partition Magic to resize windows down to the desired size (12gb) which rebooted PC so it could move the "unmovable" windows files so it all fitted within the 12gb partition. I left the free space unallocated as I would let mandrake do this later. Once PM had finished I rebooted off the mandrake cd and when prompted about the paritioning i went "custom paritioning" did auto-allocate and done. Most probably could have just done "install in free space" but I like to know whats going on hence the custom partitioning even tho using the deafults

Its all on and running nicely just need to set everything up now to work with all the stuff I want to do. I think this may be the start of my migration from windows to linux.

s0