I have a 20gb and a 3gb hard drive, and have about 6 gb of important files on the 20 gb one, and Debian running on the 3gb one. Frankly, I'm running out of space pretty quickly (i'm down to about 500mb) on my 3gb HD, and I just installed Debian to it yesterday... morning. Since I really don't want to have to backup, and/or re-download all the files I have, I want to simply install a distro to the existing ext3 partition filling the entire 20gb HD. I've tried doing this with Debian (sarge), SuSE 9.1 Personal, and Fedora Core 3, but none of them seemd to have this option. If there's a way to do this with Debian, it'd be the best thing... but if I had to I wouldn't mind using SuSE or even downloading and using say Ubuntu or Gentoo.

This is written in a very confusing manner. You have 2 drives, one 20 gig, the other 3 gig. Debian is installed on the 3 gig, and you say you have 6 gig of important files on the 20, also claiming the 20 gig is ext3 filesystem. If it is an ext3 drive, than debian should see it with no problem, you would have to add it to the fstab file. Do you have multiple partitions on the 20 gig, like ntfs and ext3? Please clarify all the partitions and the operating systems on the disk, also the location of the 6 gig of important files within the 20 gig.

Regardless of your answer for that part, any time you play with partitions and installations, you should create a backup.

Peace,
JImBass

HDA - 20gb
HDA1 - 20gb, ext3 (location of 6gb of files I don't want to remove)

HDB - 3gb
HDB1 - 2.8gb (location of Debian install)
HDB5 - 150mb swap

That's the way it stands right now. I already got Debian to locate my HDA by editing some file, but that's not really what I'm concerned about. What I want to do is install a distro to the existing HDA1 partition, but I don't know how.

Is there any OS on the hda drive, or is it just data? If it is all the same partition and filesystem then you can't install something in the unused 14 gig portion, the install does partitions, and if it is all one partition, then it all stays or it all goes.

Peace,
JimBass

Nope, no OS in HDA1, at least not anymore (Fedora Core 3 went all screwy when I installed Debian to HDB, so I removed the files). It's dissapointing that there's no way to install a distribution to that partition, but I guess I'll live. Thanks for the help.

by /dev/hda do you mean th entire hd. isnt hda1 just the 1st partition on hda. try posting the output of fdisk -l it be less confusing.