more partition questions... grr...
 

hi... im kinda cheap when it comes to new software... i dont wanna spend more than i have to... and the $70 price tag on partition magic does not make me leap for joy... is there anything available out there that will allow me to partition my hard drive w/o losing any info that won't cost me alot [if any] money? i have a winxp home system with an ntfs partition.... 15.something GB are free on a 37.somethign GB partition... i want to take ten of those free GBs and make another partition so that i can install FC2. thanks all!

There's parted but I haven't kept up with it, so don't know if it can do ntfs now or not. And various distros ship with some kind of partitioner that may or may not be based on parted. I know Mandrake does and think SuSE had one, too. So if you want to try one of those, that's solved. If not, check out parted. There may also be a thing called ntfsresize.

does FC2 have such a partitioner? that might solve my problem if it does... i have no way of backing up my data beforehand so im trying to be as cautious as possible before i destroy anything important

If you have no way of backing up your data then you probably should not resize it. Even tools like Partition Magic can cause data corruption if you're unlucky enough. The partitioning tool that comes with Mandrake (diskdrake) apparently can handle safe NTFS resize. The FC2 one cannot iirc.

While I was typing canllaith said most everything I was going to. :) Except 'why can't you back anything up?' The only NTFS I ever resized was with Mandrake and it worked fine but *everything* has risks. And I don't think Fedora can do NTFS, either, but some Fedoran may need to correct us.

thanks for the input... i may try to back it up on one of my school's servers... or i'll find a friend with a beefy hard drive... any other advice is appreciated. thanks again... i just cant stand using windows anymore.. i am also interested in getting more involved in some application development and i would like to try out the linux platform... anywho, im begining to ramble. the help i have gotten here is greatly appreciated