Hi all, i have a new computer and want to put debian on it along side windows xp. It has the one hard drive with xp already installed with no partitions. My question is can i partition the free space on the hard drive without effecting the data that is already there ie windows installation?

Really i would like a partition for the linux installation, a vfat partition for other data and then the rest for the windows installation already there!

- Tom

It's possible, but risky.
I take it Xp takes up the whole drive. (If not, forget what I said and partition the empty space during installation)
That means you will have to resize the XP partition and that is possible, but risky business, so whatever you do, make a backup first. Also, run defrag in windows before doing any partition resizing. There are plenty of posts about like for example http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...e+partition+XP

I'd attempt to do the resize from windows, by using partition magic or something like that, maybe there is a tool in admin section of the control panel, been a long time since i've booted in my windows partition. It's probably also possible, although more risky, to attempt to do this with the debian boot cd, but i wouldn't trust debian, it might kill windows, and viceversa, windows ALWAYS kills debian when partitioning. Good luck.

You should do like bobbens said. I did the same thing a while ago. Use PartitionMagic from Windows to create at least 3 (more) partitions: one for /, one for swap and one for /home. Don't forget to specify the filesystem as ext2/3 and swap. Then, the Debian installer should automatically present you the option of installing on the newly created partitions (of course, it'll want to format them, which is ok).

Actually the debian installer is pretty good at making partitions, as long as you leave the free space ahead of time, i always do it this way, because i trust debian more at making it's own partitions then partition magic. BTW, partition magic won't work again once you have linux up and running it gets hdd errors (or at least mine did), but once you have linux working, NEVER use windows to partition (unless it's an external empy hard drive), it ends up in pain and suffering.

Ok i've taken everyones advice and have managed to do what i wanted. I used partition magic in the end to resize my original windows partition by half without loosing any data! Then I split the remaining space into two more partitions, a FAT32 for data and the rest ready for my linux installation.

I'm hoping to use the FAT32 partition in both windows and linux so i can access files like music, media etc in both os's.

Thanks for the info, it helped.
- Tom

Well done then. Fat32 partition can be used without any problems by Linux (and, duh, Windows).

Yes, I get the same errors when running PMagic from Window$. It always says that LBA doesn't match the CHS and it wants to fix it. Don't do that under any circumstances.

I have used the knoppix CD's and qtparted to resize NTFS paritions without damaging windows. I have used it on 4 computers and 1 laptop without any harm. There are a few key advantages to this approach:

1. It is a free solution.
2. Knoppix runs without mounting your hard drive
3. It is a Linux solution to a Linux issue (Hey, you're learning a new Linux app as well!)

If you don't have Knoppix, Knoppix-std or Memphis, you gotta get a copy. for situations like this...and many others, its best to have a "swis army knife" OS found in a live-CD.

Yeah, it's one thing you'll never be able to do it in the other way: from Window$ to Linux.

I've tried to use knoppix, but it wouldn't run on my PC. I suppose it's a driver related issue (nForce chipset). Does anyone know how to get it running, cos I hope to be dumping windows soon and to resize my existing linux partitions?

There's no reason to assume Knoppix won't run with nForce as it's a very common chipset. Did you set your CDrom drive to be bootable in your BIOS?

I've gotten knoppix running on my computer that has an nforce2 chipset plus a radeon in agp. Just set boot order in the bios to 1. Floppy, 2. CD-ROM, 3. IDE 0. Then it should work. It'll asp for boot and type linux26 to get it running. It detects everything really well, i've had no problems so far.

I had my BIOS set correctly. Knoppix was detected and boot was started. I got a progression bar, and when I got to the end of it, the PC rebooted. Tried it twice witht the same result. I'll try 'linux26' though. What does it stand for?

Means that it will start Knoppix using a 2.6 kernel instead of the default, 2.4, one. Yet I heard (and it happened to me too) that it's a bit more unstable running this way. You can expect freezings or something else like that.

tried it, but I get an erro starting the xserver and it logs off. Need to try again with 2.4 krnel, just in case