hi i have just noticed that i have done a big error when partitioning my hard drive , i have a swap space of 11 GB wich is really a lot and stupid , the thing is i don t want to reformat my hard drive just because of this , i ve heard aboput a program called parted that will let me resize my hard drive but i want to know how safe is it and did someone tried doing this ? thanks for the help

What is your output with :
/sbin/fdisk -l

Maybe all you have to do is delete swap partition then create 2 partitions without resizing

thanks for you fast reply the outout was :
Disk /dev/hda: 30.7 GB, 30735581184 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 3736 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 1 1346 10811713+ 82 Linux swap
/dev/hda2 1347 3736 19197675 83 Linux

thanks again

You could delete /dev/hda1 then create 2 partitions in the empty space. One for swap and another for data.

One warning though: after that, your / (root) partition will be renammed to /dev/hda3 so you must edit /etc/fstab and change /dev/hda2 to /dev/hda3 for /, if you don't make the change, the system won't boot.

[edit]
To make things clear :

before :
/dev/hda1 swap
/dev/hda2 /

after you create the 2 partitions :
/dev/hda1 swap (or data)
/dev/hda2 data (or swap)
/dev/hda3 /

ok thanks for the info will do this but i don t want to restart my pc because i m running a server , so i ll wait for the right moment thanks again i really apreciate your help

ok i have just did what u suggested and it worked charmly , so thx , but the thing is when i type free :
free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 515444 257452 257992 0 27204 135804
-/+ buffers/cache: 94444 421000
Swap: 0 0 0

my hard disk looks like this :

Disk /dev/hda: 30.7 GB, 30735581184 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 3736 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 1 232 1863508+ 82 Linux swap
/dev/hda2 1347 3736 19197675 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 233 1346 8948205 83 Linux

and my fstab looks like this :
/dev/hda1 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hda2 / reiserfs defaults 1 1
/dev/hda3 /wutever
/dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,owner,ro,user 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,owner,ro,user 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0


can u plz tell me why linux is not seing my swap ?

if anyone will have the same problem what i did to fix this was as root i typed this command:
mkswap /dev/hda1 wich will make swap
and then :
swapon -a

the free command gave this:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 515444 171068 344376 0 7464 61420
-/+ buffers/cache: 102184 413260
Swap: 1863500 0 1863500