...install Puppy Linux (PL) formally within its own part. in the hard drive. The thing is that I have "Parted Magic" or "GParted" somewhere but I'm afraid of ruining something. My logic goes like this: if Windows can defragment a HD (so it moves many files from one place to another in such a way that they end up physically contigous), why repartitioning a disk involves so many risks?
What is a good choice for a newbie?
Thanks for any help/info provided!

The risk is usually due to the person partitioning not being familiar with the process. It isn't any more risky than a lot of other things we do with computers. I'd suggest a little reading on partitioning.

One problem many windows users have is understanding the difference between drive and partition since windows seems to use these terms interchangeable, hence adding to the confusion.

I'm not really sure what your question is, a good choice for a newbie for what? The number of partitions? size of partitions? formatting and creating filesystems?

Puppy is pretty easy to install if you have some knowledge of Linux and in addition it is very small, doesn't take up a lot of space. It would probably be a good idea, particularly if you are not familiar with creating partitions, to load Puppy as a Live CD, open a terminal and run the command fdisk -l (lower case Letter L) in a terminal to get your partition information and post it here so you can get specific advice.

If you have windows installed, especially if it is an OEM, you probably have one large partition, maybe two if you have a Recovery partition so the fdisk info would be helpful.

Thanks for responding, yancek!
I'm going to search for info on partitioning in the web during the rest of the week; do you have a suggestion for a good site/doc to read about this?
In relation to your 2nd paragraph, I understand that 'drive' may refer to the unit where a disk could be loaded &/or the disk itself; a partition is a 'logical' part of a disk that, for the purposes of the OS, will be dealt with as if it were a separate unit while in fact being just one "physical unit". I beleive that all this thing of partitioning a disk aroused due to the risks sometimes involved in certain processes that users enter & they wanted to "isolate" any hazard to just a certain area of the disk instead of risking everything (I might be wrong/incomplete on this).
I'm sorry that I didn't explained myself clearly. What I wanted to transmit was that I consider myself a newbie in relation to linux as well as around the theme of partitioning a disk. I've read something about partitioning & my present notion of a good practice when arranging a disk in this way is to create a backup, 1st part for Windows, 2nd part for the linux OS (assuming just one distro), 3rd part as a swap file & the 4th part for, lets say, non-operating system programs & data.
Up to now this is my vision of what I must accomplish after finishing this task.
I'm running 'Mounted partitions' (a Puppy software) that shows the following:
I- /dev/sda1 Used: 13719 Free: 5349
II- puppy421 Used: 256 Free: 239
III- unionfs Used: 256 Free: 239
IV- ramdisk Used: 0 Free: 29
This is the first time I run this app, hope this data is useful for the purpose. I knew from much before installing PL that my HD is a 20 GB one partition disk formatted as a FAT 32 one. While in the process of dual-frugally-booting PL with Windows I read that for a proper installation of PL I have two choice: LILO or GRUB. I understand that with GRUB there're some risks of altering the MBR & WIndows installation during the process but need to learn more around this. I know that what I'm intending to do has given many some trouble & loosing info is a "real & present danger". I also know that, with the right info, it is a task that could be done.
I've searched within the Menu > System folder in my PL 421 desktop & found:
1) GParted - Partition manager; 2) Pdisk - " " . I've never started any of these but they're there (hopefully, correctly installed). I mention this because I don't have a live cd as you mention in your post & you may know if any of these is of any use for owr purposes.

Courage...

You can download and burn a copy of PartedMagic or GPartedLive, live-cd partitioning tools and boot one of them to look at your partitions. You can practice using the GParted graphic interface and try fdisk and cfdisk.

GParted will not make any changes without giving you ample warning. As you are booting a live-cd, you may abort the partitioner at any time, in the most basic case, by killing power to the system. fdisk and cfdisk have man pages that will tell you what to do and not to do.

That request to post the results of "fdisk -l" was good advice. Open a terminal in Puppy with root privileges.

Otherwise, try to post using spacing between parts of your message. Large, contiguous blocks of text are harder to read than text in shorter sections.

You might read and remember this practical guide.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/...Ask_a_Question

I think that this is a good basic article about partitioning. Try to read the incorporated links

http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/...Ask_a_Question

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