Partition SIZE

I installed SuSe linux on my computer about six months ago. The computer is running fine, but I have a problem. My windows XP partition is running out of space and I have about 15 GB of free space in my Linux partition. I am using Linux because I want to learn to use it more efficeintly and eventually I want to use this OS to replace windows and start using it full time, but for now I need complete capabilities in my windows partition. Can anyone tell me how can I resize the partition by giving some of the free space in my linux partition to my windows partition, so I can continue having them reside my hard disk. I tried to resize by using the partitioner in Yast2 and by installing Linux again and using the setup to resize the partition from the begginning, but I could not do it. Hopefully there is a way, otherwise I am going to have to take the sad decision of saying good bye to Linux until I buy a new computer with more hard disk space.


Thank you
Enrique Hoyos

Well you didn't object to re-installing linux so I'm going to assume it's ok. I haven't used Suse before so I'm once again going to have to assume. What you do is (of course) back-up all your important data and then re-install SuSE. It should have an option to re-size the partitions. You just Decrease the size of your linux partition to free space then re-install windows and it should format that free space. If you don't want to re-install windows and linux you coud try sojmething like Partition Magic to see if you can resize the partitions without losing data.

Whatever you do DON'T FORGET TO BACK-UP!!!!

Perhaps a more efficient use of disk space would be to create a separate documents partition. If (when you re-install Linux) you create a FAT32 partion of, say 20GB, in addition to your Windows and Linux partitions, that you could use for documents, movies, etc. I would use some of the space set aside for Linux for this.

Then you can point "My Documents" in windows to this new partion. Then create a directory in Linux, say /mnt/files, which this new drive mounts to. This means that your documents and music, etc, are available to both linux and windows, and (Perhaps) it will save some space on your hard disk.

In addition, you can probably get away with about 5GB for linux at first, since your documents will be on a separate partition.

--Ian