Dear all,

I have Debian on an 80 GB HDD - the only HDD that I have. Now, I have around 20 GB of free space on this. I want to partition this 20 GB and make it a primary partition so that I am able to install other Operating Systems. How do I do that? Please help.

Do you mean you have 20GB of free space on the drive outside of the Debian partition or the drive is a single 80GB partition with 20GB free space in it?

If it's the first one, just use GParted to partition the free space. If not, you may try to use GParted to shrink the partition, but that depends on the file system. I've never tried shrinking a linux partition before (just Windows XP), so I'm not too sure about reliability.

Either way, I'd make a backup of anything important before I did anything. Oh, keep testdisk handy on a live CD to fix your partition table in the event that it doesn't work.

Thanks. The HDD is a single 80 GB disk. My Linux and some data take around 60 GB of it, and the rest is free. I want to take 10 GB out of this and make it a primary partition so that I can install an OS like Windows on that.

Ok. The Gparted SW shows that my drive /dev/sda is a read-only memory. Because of this, I am not able to perform any operations on the disk. What to do ?

You'll have to do it from a LiveCD because right now the filesystem is mounted. You can't shrink a partition while it is in use.