Hi Gurus,
My 80 GB (laptop) hard disk is setup like this.

0_____10______20_____30______40______50______60______70_____80

<-----------------><---><-----><---------------------------->
| | | |
25GB 500MB 1GB 54GB
WinXP ext2 swap reiserfs
ntfs /boot /



I want to shrink my WinXP to 10GB and use the free space 15GB (25 -10) to increase ' / ' linux reiser partition.

Is it possible to resize and move the partitions?

It's certainly possible to do with commercial tools like Acronis Disk Director which has excellent linux support for ext2,3 and reiserfs:

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing.../diskdirector/

It's a windows program but you can make a bootable cd that can run the program once you install it in windows. In fact, the bootable cd is really a mini bootable linux cd. This is the best commercail partitioning tool I've found with very good linux support. I don't recommend Partition Magic which has bad linux support IMHO.

I don't know if I'd try to do that with free tools like cfdisk or sfdisk. The live cd, PCLOS, has a nice graphical partitioning suite adopted from mandrake/mandriva's "Control Center"(harddrake):

http://www.pclinuxos.com/page.php?6

This is the best free partitioning tool I've seen and can resize ntfs. What you need to do is shrink that first partition down and put the unallocated space on the back end of the partition. Then increase the adjacent partition with that unallocated space and decrease it and put the unallocated space on it's back end and so on until you get that unallocated space to your end partition. I would do each of these operations separately backing up data before each operation.

Hi Bio physics,

First of all, i am not a guru; i use partition magic to solve problems like these. However even PM has its limits.

To answer your question it would be helpfull to know what data you can afford to lose, what bootmgr you use, which partitions are at present bootable, would you consider a reinstall of linux, are these all primairy partitions, are you sure there is not one of those hidden partitions with windows recovery software present etc...

From your posting i guess that the XP and ext2 partitions are both primairies and swap and the big one are in an extended partition.

Repartitioning is risky without proper tools and experience. After several failures I ended up with the following scheme on my (3) multiboot systems:
primary 1: XP 10 Gbyte
primary 2: Linux (excluding /home) 4 Gbyte
extended partition with
extended1: swap (1,5 times ram size)
extended2: ntfs (XP data disk with "my documents" etc)
extended3: /home

Benefits of a separate /home partition become obvious when you have to reinstall linux, no worries about loosing data

rgds