I am thinking of increasing the size of my current partition.

my current partition information is as follows
start -end
/dev/hda 1-5815 Fat32 <--around 40gb where my windows OS is
>hda2 5437-5815 Extended
>hda5 5437-5815 Ext3 <-where my Linux OS is

the reason for this post is that i read that if i change the starting point
of my partitiong i would have a hard time getting my filesystem to come
again.

what basicaly i want to do is make my partition bigger.. but i cant increase
the ending point because the partition is located at the end of the hard drive
therefore, in order to achieve this i have to decrease the starting point to gain
more space..

with that in mind..

my question is.
what kind of trouble would i run into by decreasing the start point of my linux
partition. and how can i resolve them?

Thank for taking the time on reading my post =D

Never tried it myself but from what I've read, if you resize the starting section of a partition, linux or windows, you will not be happy! It will trash that partition.
Your best option would be to make an image of the linux system and the windows system also . Then restore the windows system using a smaller partition size, then restore the linux system using a larger partition size.

have you looked into System Commander (v-com.com)

it'll give you a heads up on what you are doing. anther product is bootitng and then there is acronis.

- perry

is there any way of doing it it without paying for software?

I read I would have a hard time. but it never said it was impossible.

how would it trash the partition I change the starting point for?.

First let me say that I have never actually tried resizing partitions.

Ok, with that out of the way, homey, you said that you heard moving the beginning of the partition will trash it? That might well be the case, but I think I remember seeing an option to move the beginning of the partition in fdisk, probably in the expert options. I don't know if it works or not, but perhaps you could combine that with parted if it actually exists.

Good luck

I also have another idea. that might work.

what if I were to make another partition before my current linux partition
then mount the partition to be used as free space in my current Linux, is that possible?

Im not all that familiar with Linux but would that be possible. or only way is to resize my current partition like I originally planned?

The OS would no longer be able to read the partition, since the starting point is no longer where the OS is looking for it (it writes itself a note to tell itself where it is, and now that note is wrong).

Trust me, if you want to do something like this with software (or even backup a partition so it can be restored pristine to a new partition), you don't want to complain about paying for the software that will do it for you.

This is a very delicate and dangerous series of operations, that risks losing your irreplaceble data or making it inaccessible. If you want to do that on a running system, the software that is going to accomplish that is not going to come free, because it took a lot of skill and man-hours to create.

If you want to do it for free, backup all your data manually, reformat and repartition the drive, reinstall whatever OS you're going to use, and restore your data manually.

However, I would suggest an alternative: shrink the Windows partition (under Windows), create a Linux partition and mount it under Linux as either an extra partition which you can use for whatever you want, or move some part of the Linux install's root filetree's mount points to that new partition (such as /opt/ or /tmp or /var).

That's a lot less dangerous, overall.

I think we are somewhere in the same page with the making of a separate partitions..

but i lake the knowledge to do what you have just put on the table.

I think i might be able to shrink the partition under windows.. that is the least of my problems..

how would i go about mounting the /tmp /var or /opt and will that make it so that linux actually uses that space as free space. or something of the sort?

any info would be greatly appreciated, Thanx

If you want to use the newly-created partition as "free space" (for downloads, or installed Wine games, or media files or whatever), all you have to do is create a mount point for it (I would suggest in your $HOME$ directory, for the convenience, although you should read man mount to set your mount options for the fs correctly in /etc/fstab) and then stick the files in there.

I have an "extra" ext3 partition that I use for big downloads and also to install Wine games, and hold Neverwinter Nights (which is over 2GB before save games. I definitely don't want it expanding and taking up all the space in my / filetree). I mount it to my ~/ as "lindata". It's easy enough to then set a download manager/FTP client/IRC client to use that as its download folder, to set Wine to use a folder created there as its 'fake_windows" (which allows me to install games under Wine to "C:\Program Files" as they prefer by default and have them on that partition), and to store data files cut or copied from other partitions.

If you want to move your entire /home folder to the new partiton, or /usr, or /var, that is also possible, but a little more complex. If you want to do something like that, give me a few minutes; I can find a HOW-TO easily enough, but I'm in the middle of a couple of things atm .

that would be great. Thank you.. I will start making the partition to be used.

hopefully I wont encounter problems there. =D

Adding a New Hard Disk/Partition

Linux Magazine | March 2000 | TECH SUPPORT | Top Tech Support Questions

Partitioning in action: Moving /home

LinuxQuestions.org - Move an existing partition to a new hard drive? - where Linux users come for help

lubox.com - HOW-TO Linux - HOW-TO move your home directory [ /home ] to another partition

Knoppix Linux Documentation - Home Partition How To

They basically all say the same thing:

1. Make the new partition.

2. Make a mount point in /mnt for the new partiton.

3. Mount the new partition to the new mount point.

4. Copy the contents of the folder in question (/home is most often used, but you can move the mount point of pretty much any folder in the / filetree, depending on your needs-- for example, if you ran a lot of servers for web, mail and/or ftp, which create big log files, you might want to move /var to its own partition, or even /var/log, as that's where the log files are created by default) to the new partition. Use tar to copy the files, so that the permissions and symlinks are preserved.

5. Add a line to /etc/fstab telling it that /home (or /var or /opt or /usr-- whatever you are moving) is now going to be located in the new partition.

6. Rename the folder currently in use to /*_old ("*" being replaced by whatever the folder name was before; home, var, opt, whatever) using mv, to preserve your existing data in case this whole thing goes south.

7. Reboot, and the new partition should be mounted as /home or /opt or /var or whatever you moved. Use dk -f to confirm that the system has mounted and is using the partition as expected. Check for any other problems (is your data there, can you write to the folder normally, etc).

8. If everything's OK, you can delete the original folder (/*_old) and reclaim that space for the root filetree. If everything is not OK for some reason, you can always rename the original folder back, remove the line from /etc/fstab so that the new partition does not mount, reboot, and all should be as it was, so that you can go over what you did again and see what went wrong.

But again, you don't necessarily have to do it this way, depending on what kind of files are taking up all your space. If they are data files (and not system files or programs), you can simply mount the new partition, move the data to it, and then use it from there-- if the data currently lives in your $HOME$, moving it to its own space will also increase the available space on your root filetree, and is somewhat simpler and less alarming than moving part of the root filetree itself.

Hope this helps explain things for you .

ok..hello . my best advice is to use partition magic.. the gui is really greatand it comes with a good manual

hamza11050, you must mean for resizing the Windows partition. You can't resize an installed Linux partition using that tool. However, it is a good tool for Windows, and definitely should be considered for use to manage the Windows partition. It is very touchy, though, when dealing with Linux partitions (it can't do everything it claims), and plus, it costs money, so it might not be worth it for EndoEarth to pay for a tool for an OS that s/he is using less often that doesn't work well with the OS s/he's using more often.

>>If you want to do that on a running system, the software that is going to accomplish that is not going to come free, because it took a lot of skill and man-hours to create.

What is this www.windowsquestions.org ???

I got Partition Magic8.0.... and
I made my Windows Paritions Smaller by 7GIGs and i made my current linux Partition
Bigger by that 7GiGs it all works and runs.

Thank you all for the good advice..
I learned quite a few things.