Hi,

Sorry to post another newbie partition question , but I haven't found any specific answers for my situation yet. I currently have a 40GB HDD on my Gateway 450ROG laptop separated into the following partitions:

hda1: FAT32 windows, 5GB
hda2: ext3 MEPIS, 35GB
hda3: swap, 512MB

I would really like to separate the MEPIS partition in two and install Gentoo just for fun, to learn about Linux while still having a system that I know will work for a noob like me. I've tried booting with a liveCD and running qtparted, but it apparently won't let me resize the Linux partition. When I tried to run parted from the command line, it said something like "there is something strange about this ext2 filesystem," and wouldn't let me do anything with it. I also don't want to spend any money on a partition resizing program because I am a broke student. Thanks for your help, the Linux community is great!

--C

Parted is supposed to handle ext3, but I had the same issue within the last week.
May depend on the version on the liveCD. I gave up, and just tar-ed up the partition, and deleted it, and used the space for 3 partitions.
Lucky me, the tar fitted on a USB key, but I was prepared to split it in need, and move it via the key to another machine.

Alright, I guess I'll get some use out of my 250GB external HD. It'll be inconvenient, but it'll work. Thanks.

--C

Tar-ing my whole root filesystem didn't work, so instead of breaking up my Linux partition, I decided to reformat my Windows XP partition to ext3 . I'm now running Mepis and Kubuntu (decided to save Gentoo for later). It feels good to be Microsoft-free!

--C

I have the same problem. "parted" is a stupid app. It has only 2 advantages: it can resize ext2 and fat32. All the rest (and even more!) I can do with ONLY "cfdisk", or "fdisk"...

Does anyone know free app that works with ext3 (or even reiserfs???).
Thanks.