Hi all, fist time poster in need of help.

I am taking intro to networking at my local CC and one of the other students told me about Mandrake Linux... I was interested in what I heard... so, I downloaded the four ISO files and proceeded to install it on my laptop.

Very cool operating system, I must admitt. The problem comes from me not really knowing what I was doing While I was installing, I left only 20 gig of my 40 gig hard drive for Windows. I didn't see this to be a problem at the time, figureing that I could just bum around on both... no biggie. Once it was installed, I noticed that dirvers for my wirless card... well I can't find them So, I find myself not really doing much with the Linux side.

I guess my question is... is there any way to get 10 gig of the hard drive, of the 20 that linux is on, and allocate it back to windows?

If I have to uninstall linux, and reinstall I can do that... but would like that ot be the last option.

Any suggestions? and let it be known, I don't know much about programming or computer languages... so, if there is a solution... please please please put it and any steps, into simplest terms LOL

Thanks in advance for any help.

Shot

Hello,

Yould re-partition the linux partition so that half of it is NTFS

in effect you would have this:

| NTFS | Linux | NTFS |
20 10 10

On your drive. While this would work, Windoze is so backward that it would have to assign the second partition as another drive. So you would end up with a 'C' and 'D' drive on your PC. Obviously you could store stuff on that - but not system stuff....

Personally I would create a FAT partition so that both linux and WinDoh's can look at it. Put your larger files on that....

Why not start a thread about your Wireless in Linux? I'm sure you'll get it running okay. What hardware do you have? I have my dell latitude running ubuntu on wireless........

Probably the easiest way to do that is to use a commercial app like Partition Magic. Delete the Linux partition, then expand the Windows partition and finally reinstall Linux.

As for the wireless bit, surf over to Linuxquestions wireless forum and see if they can help.

Baldrick

It's not recommendable to resize a partition with ext3 or reiserfs filesystem (anyway resizing ntfs or fat isn't a big deal).
I personally had only negative experience with that and this way i would reinstall mandrake.

Maybe there are some other peoples out there who could give some use- and helpful hints or can give you a failsafe advice on resizing partitions with linux typical filesystems.

About your WLAN Card:
you should search for drivers according to your chipset of your WLAN Device.

Well, if you haven't done too much with linux so far, you can afford

+ Removing Linux partition
+ Resizing Windows
+ Reinstalling Linux

But as satinet said, I would prefer not to resize the NTFS partition, but create a FAT32, since Linux can write in FAT32 without risks, so it is ideal to share files between the systems. Just don't forget to install Linux and then configure your wireless card .

Good luck!

If u don't have any valuable data on Linux .. Its better u reinstall .. Linux doesn't support NTFS by default .. You will have to download a patch for that and even then u will have only read access on that NTFS partition when u will access it from Linux ..

So I wud suggest

00. Uninstall Linux
01. Change Partition size
02. Change Filesystem (From NTFS to FAT 32)
04. Reinstall Linux
05. Have a sound sleep

Good Luck ..

ayrus .........

Well that goes for redhat/fedora only. Redhat chose to compile their kernels without ntfs read support, so the patch you are talking about is the precompiled kernel module of the official kernel. Most distros come with NTFS read support, knoppix, suse, mandrake,slackware. There is a way to write to NTFS with captive ntfs( which actually uses the windows read/write NTFS drivers). I think suse and knoppix have this by default installed, but personally, although they say it works fine, I don't trust it.
Every distro has it's own personality, but referring to linux when you are actually only talking about REDHAT linux, is not a good thing to do....
Just my opinion....