resizing, formatting, merging...
 

My greetings LQ! I want you guys to help me in accomplishing on very serious task....

I have 20GB hard drive:
/dev/hda
{
/dev/hda1 - NTFS 6.5GB Partition where WinblozeXP lives ( but not for long )
/dev/hda2 - reiserFs 3GB Linux part
/dev/hda3 - Linux Swap 256Mb
/dev/hda5 - Fat32 part ( where music is stored :D ) all rest space

So what I want to do is resize ntfs part. to 3GB, shrink XP, and install there Win2k.
Then redistribute free space that should be 3GB and add it to Linux :)
Main problem is: How to add this 3GB to Linux?
I want to make it with GNU-Parted. Guys can you provide me with some info on how can I solve this problem :D
I would be very glad to hear some answers
thnx

Parted cant' handle NTFS, unfortunatelly. Partition Magic can. I don't remember any free program that is able to do it for you...

Yes I will do NTFS resizing with PM, but I need to merge reiserfs part with freespace :)
???

you would just need to create a fylesystem on the free space you'd have after resizing NTFS, so say it is /dev/hdb2, first format it
cfdisk /dev/hdb2
to linux native, then
mke2fs /dev/hdb2, you can create journaling as well ext3 with -j flag
then create a mount point for it
cd /
mkdir /misc
and mount it
mount -text3 /dev/hdb2 /misc
if everything goes as planned
add the entry to /etc/fstab
/dev/hdb2 /misc ext3 defaults 1 2
and you should be alright
consult man page for mke2fs
and if you want ReiserFS, JFS, or XFS instead use the appropriate tools to create such types of filesystem. It is a little bit off head for me I don't remember the tool names, so http://google.com/linux should save you a fortune.

It is mkreiserfs for reiserfs
mkreiserfs /dev/hdb2
as an example and make sure to include write filesystem in the mount command and /etc/fstab instead of ext3

And at that point, you then could probably use parted to distribute the space, if you wanted to add it to a fast filling partition. Since it'd be ext2/3 or Reiser, you should have more luck with it. But if you just wanted to add it to Linux, and have it available for whatever, Boris has given quite the good answer, and you can stop after that.

Cool

Thank you, but it only for now, I will have more questions in that thread :)