Hi,

I've realized that my current disk partitioning isn't working for me. I'm tri-booting two linux distros and Win2K with a large /home partition and a shared VFAT partition. I need to shrink one of the linux partitions and move most of the /home space to the shared partition so that it's accessible from all OS's.

I've used gparted in the past and it's worked well for me. I'm wondering what the dangers are to my data and installations to edit the partitions? I'd love any insight you could give me.

Thanks so much in advance!

The obvious answers are:

1. When you resize partitions there is a chance of data corruption, i.e. you will lost all the data.
2. If you actually move partitions around you may have to edit your boot loaders configuration file so it knows which partition to look at when booting.

That's all I can think of at the moment.

HTH

You could actually do it with a minimal amount of moving: reformat the /home partition to ntfs (if you use ntfs-3g, Linux can write to/read from ntfs). Before doing so, however, you need to copy or move any files on it to a safe location and temporarily move the /home directory to your / partition. If you have sufficient space on that / partition, you could do it in one go.

Shrinking a / partition tends to be tricky. I use XFS an I have found that Gparted can grow this type of filesystem but it can't shrink it. In other words, no shrinking without deleting... I'm afraid shrinking ext3 won't work either.