When I inatalled Mandrake I had 16 gb of unformated space and when I installed it Mandrake make a 7 gb and a 9 gb partition for linux and my question is how do I merge these two partitions without losing data?

anybody got an idea?

by nature, modifying/resizing partitions is destructive (ie. you lose your data). programs like Partition Magic can non-destructively modify partitions, but i'm not sure if that prog only works under windows, and being new to linux i know of no linux equivalent.

Well if you have a spare HD you can do this, towers-of-hanoi style. You don't say what your current 2nd partition is -- I'll chance it and say it's either /home or perhaps /usr. If it's /usr I don't know if you can pull this off, but /home should be doable.

- What you do is, pop in the extra disk (I'm presuming it's bigger than your second partition).
- Log in as root and mount that new disk as /mnt/newdisk.
- Copy everything from /home to /mnt/newdisk. Do <something brilliant> to preserve access rights.
- Unmount both /home and /mnt/newdisk (do this while being logged in as root, of course, so /home is not used.
- Mount your 2nd disk as /home. (Reboot?)
- Blame somebody else than me if this doesn't work -- I'm not an expert (see my status). But this is what I'd do, in any case.

Good luck!

Oh yes, after you're done with the above, time to merge your partitions:
- Use a disk partitioning tool (such as PowerQuest PartitionMagic, others might do equally well) to enlarge your primary partition (back up first of course, but PQM should be able to do it non-destructively).
- Create a new directory there, call it e.g. /homesoon.
- Copy all of /home to /homesoon, again preserving access rights and whatnot.
- Unmount /home, rename /homesoon to /home.
- Done? Weep? Cheer?

/me runs and hides, just in case.