so far on my computer i have one huge NTFS partition that has not been fully used up there is at least 10 gigs of space that is "free" acording to windows. is there a way to shrink my windows partition and use the 10gigs of free space for mandrake linux 9.2 without haveing to reinstall anything but linux its self. 30 gigs of stuff is a pain in the 'you know what' to reinstall

thanks in advance
Exley

mandrake handles repartitioning quite well. be certain to defrag the windows partion before hand, also, during install of mandrake don't resize the windows partition any smaller than the "used space" reported by windows.
good luck.

so is that a no your data will not be harmed if your careful then?

pretty much. there is always that one in a million chance that something will go wrong(have had and heard lots of partition magic failures). the fact is anytime your resizing an active partition something can go wrong. to be safe do some thorough backups before hand, however, i have done this and it worked just fine. the big key is the defragging of the windows partition as it fragments very badly. as i stated before, if the patition is defragmented , and, you don't resize it any smaller than the data that is on it, you shouldn't have a problem. keep in mind to allow some free space, as windows doesn't use a swap file per say. it just swaps whever it can find some free space. with that in mind it would probably be a good idea to leave at least a gig more than windows reports "used".
good luck.