Hello all,

I convinced a friend of mine to step over from the dark side and give Linux a try. He was ready to scrap windows altogether, but I convinced him that he may want to keep it around for a bit just to make sure he likes Linux. Anyway, I was wondering: He only has one hard drive, so obviously we need to shrink his windows partition.

Is it ok just to defrag his drive then use fdisk to shrink it, or do we need to get partition magic to do the job? Is there a free alternative to partition magic? I bought a second HD when I installed Linux so I have not had to deal with this before. He tells me he is only using less than a 1/4 of his HD now, but I haven't seen his 'puter yet so I'm not sure about his hardware.

Any help/advice is appreciated. . .

TIA

in redhat and in mandrake they both can both preform non-destructive resizes on the partion with windows on it. so you won't loose information, just size. i think this is whay you want.

Thanks,

that's exactly what I want.
I should have mentioned I'm going to install RedHat 8.0.
Cheers.

Wow, cool, good mind reading job there chrismiceli!

I was gonna come in here and suggest that FIPS thing, and Parted. Also there is a program called something like Ranish Partitioner or something, and it's supposed to be good too.

Anyway, glad you got it fixed so quickly

Cool