How to repartition -- Parted boot disks not on GNU
 

I have RH9 (which I'm trying to get out of!), and want to install slackware. I have a
FAT32 partition with win98, and would like to keep RH9 around until my slackware is
working and I have the things I need installed.

My reading is that to use parted, I need to have the partitions I'm resizing, copying, and so on unmounted. So, I need parted on a floppy or a bootable CD. (I have parted and tune2fs on my RH 9).

Was going to make a parted boot disk and parted disk as per the parted documentation, but the gnu/parted site only has very old parted distributions available, and no boot disk images, and, as far as I could find no source.

My RH has parted from redhat, but most likely not statically compiled, so I would need to find the right library files to put that on a floppy.

I downloaded and burned a SystemRescueCD, but it crashes during the hotplug sequence, and I haven't found how to get beyond that.

I downloaded and burned the slackware 9.1 CD1 and CD2. Both boot. They have tune2fs on the booted system (for disabling journaling on the ext3 file systems), but not parted.

CD 2, of course, has parted in the extras directory which I can get at from RH9.

And, by the way, I have an old partition magic (4.0), which is reported to be OK for handling ext2 partitions (or de-journaled ext3 partitions).

So -- any suggestions?
-- use Partition Magic 4?

-- Another source for parted bootdisks than gnu mirrors?

-- A way to transfer the parted I've got and the required library files to a floppy?

-- A live distribution with parted that won't crash on booting?

(By the way, I burned a gentoo 3.2 live CD and it seems to work fine, but no parted on it -- does Knoppix have parted? -- would like to avoid very many 700MB downloads, but can do it if needed).

-- any other suggestions?

Thanks, and best regards,

John Velman

If PM4 will do non-destructive partitioning, I would go with that. Simply create a free partition and install to that partition. You do not need to specify the file system through Partition Magic as the install for Slackware will define all of that.

Oops - nearly forgot, Welcome to LQ.

Thanks, and thanks for the reminder that I don't have to specify t;he file system(s) on the new partitions(s). I'll give PM a try.

Thanks for the Welcome. This is a great facility!

I'll Affero you if I figure out how. Another thing that is new to me!

Best,

John Velman

Re: How to repartition -- Parted boot disks not on GNU
 

You can find the Parted source at:

http://members.optushome.com.au/clausen/projects.html.

Lyle

Hello,

You may wanna try this.

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootitng.html

I got it last yr and love it!! You can use it as shareware w/ full functionality, but if you install it to your drive,after 30 days it will beep once for each day after 30 . But you can use it from a floppy with no restriction, you can create, manipulate, resize, slide etc your partitions. And if you install it to it's own 8 meg partition on your disk, you can do all of the above plus use it as a boot manager. Also i am not affiliated with this software but have found it to be perhaps the most useful i have ever found. Since i like to tinker with os' and do multiple boots etc.

I use it as a part and boot manager and have 2kpro, XP, slack9.1 and Mepis linux on my system. Anyway hope that helps.

Peace,
Boutros

Thought I'd let folks know how this came out, if anyone is still watching.

I checked the website suggested by Boutros, and it looked interesting so decided to pass.

I downloaded the parted source from the sight referenced by Lyle. I compiled it statically and put it on a floppy. This turned out to be a lifesaver. -- see below.

I installed PM 4.0 in my win98 distribution, and used it for an intial resizing of my RH root. So far so good.

Tried to reboot RH9. Kernel panic. Oops, I forgot that Grub needed to be reinstalled.

I finally couldn't understand the Grub documentation well enough to know what to do.

-- So, I completed my repartitioning using the Slackware CD 2 hot linux and the parted on my floppy.

Then installed Slackware from CD1 (kind of a middle selection -- X, but skipping
gnome and KDE for now, skipping lots of audio things I don't normally use).

Anyhow, the lilo simple install picked up win98 and slackware with no problem. X and my network worked out of the box.

I compiled and installed iceWm, so the development system is working.

GREAT. Lots of setup left to do -- can't figure out how CUPS works, but I'll
get it pretty soon.

Thanks to all who responded.

Best,

John Velman

Glad that everything worked out for ya,

I am in the learning process here too. I am gonna try to get my scanner working tonite.

Peace,
Boutros

I need a clean repartition also, this time I ll delete whole extended partition (hda5,hda6,hda7,hda8,hda9). Lastime I was able to use cfdisk to delete any partition in the middle in between, n then repartition 4 gig block from bottom up, every thing look cool, bcoz I can use cfdik also to adjust the order of the partition numbering also.

Untill I realized now that the partition number wut displayed when I boot slack and other distro rh looked different. Now that I got a HD crush this morning, it ll be time for me to make a clean repartitioning, but that ll take me time, coz gonna need to burn something into silver disk now ..

But I think I still use fdisk, if I use cfdisk no bottom up partitioning again ..