This might not be a newb question, but i'm a newb asking a question...

I've had SuSE 9.1 professional installed for a while now, but I now realize that I need a Windows Dual-Boot. So I've learned the hard way that if you want a dual-boot, install windows first. My hard-drive is divided into three partitions, the Boot, / (reiser), and a swap file space. I found GNU Parted and installed it. It gave an error about unmounting it first. So I tried to umount it but it was in use. So (after extensive googling) I switched to runlevel 1, then umounted it. So I again tried to resize it. But it said it was not unmounted. I'm guessing that when I run Parted it started using the partition and i'm not allowed to resize when its in use. So then I found the Parted boot disks, to try and not use the hard drive, but they did not support the reiserFS. So I'm now at a loss to find out how to resize it.

Does your SuSE have 'rescue' boot option? It should and it shoud run without mounting the partiton (or just allow you to unmount it). Parted may be also available running from the cd.

I was able to boot into rescue mode, it did have parted, but once again the version is too old and does not support reiserFS. Any other ideas? Is there a way to make my own boot disk with an updated version and compiled with libreiserfs?

edit:added clarity to a sentence

If you're broadband, download Knoppix or any other CD-baced distribution. They all should have ReiserFS support.

I used this to repartition my hard drive:

http://www.sysresccd.org/

It works fairly well, has qtparted (graphical frontend to gnuparted) and supports most file systems, plus there's lots of other utilities.

marc