Hiya,

When I first installed Linux (Mandrake 10.0) I had used Partition Magic to resize my Windows partition to give Linux some space to create its partitions with. Currently my hard drive looks like this:

Drive C: ~ about 14 gigabytes
/ ~ about 15 gigs
/home ~ about 10 gigs
linux swapspace ~ about 450 megabytes

I am using Windows rarely now, and I would like to give that 14 gigs to linux. I don't want to loose the data that linux has, though. How would I go about doing this. I can't use Partition Magic because it is located on the partition that I want to remove, or is there a way to still use it. I believe linux has some programs that can do what I need. How do I use them?

edit: oh, and if I no longer have windows, will I still need to use GRUB, is there a way to 'uninstall' it?

You could use Qtparted (a partition magic clone for linux)

The easiest (and probably least technical) way to do this would be to change the windows partition to your favourite linux type (ext3 /reiserFS/... ) and ten make a synbolical link in your home directory to the new partition. Unless of course you had something specific in mind for that partition.

k, thanks. i forgot about qtparted. What about getting rid of GRUB? Is there any way to boot straight into my linux kernel? Is this recommended?

Unfortunately no, you need a bootloader that is capable of booting the Linux kernel, be it Grub/Lilo/Syslinux or whatever.

King4lex, instead of getting rid of grub - just set the default time limit to a lower value say 2 or 3 seconds, that way you still have the option to boot into other variations. My system has several different modes of booting into linux, kinda like when you press F8 when windows is booting. Also, if you upgrade your kernel it should add a new entry for the new kernel although I believe it only updates lilo but don't quote me on this , this is nice incase the new kernel has problems or won't boot at all, this has happend to me.