Well I've been trying to do this for a few days and been reading everything, but no success. My partition table is as follows:

1-> / - 6g
2-> swap - 500mb
3-> /backups - 20g
4-> /usr - 10g
5-> /home - 40g

I basically want to resize the backup partition to 16g and make two new 2 gig partitions. There is no data on this partition and right now its ext3, but could be converted to any file system.

I was successful in resizing the partition to 16g using resize2fs but for some reason fdisk still sees it as a single 20g partition. I can look at the size in nautilus and that says it is 16 gigs. So my question is, how can I create two new partitions after I have resized it?

I do have partition magic 8 on floppies saved from when I had windows, but it can't read my partition table for some reason and shows the entire hard drive as a raw unpartitioned disk.

You are confusing your partition with your file system. resize2fs has resized your filesystem, leaving unallocated space on the partition on which it resided.

parted is the tool that will allow you to resize your partition.

If you are going to be rejuggling your partitions and filesystems on an active system, you might want to investigate LVM (logical volume manager). It adds a level of abstraction, but greatly simplifies rejiggering your file systems.

Thanks, I'll look into LVM. I tried using parted but It says there is no support for an ext3 filesystem. I then converted it to an ext2 file system and parted won't even recognize it. I get this error, the same one I got when I tried to resize it as an ext3: