I have recently installed Mandrake 8.1.
So, not everything is working perfectly yet, but most is going well and I'm enjoying learning about Linux.

But, like a fool, when I installed, I chose to partition part of my big (75gig) drive with the installer and give a lovely 4gig to Linux. This worked great as it left the windows data intact.

I'm now wishing I gave Linux more space as I am filling up the root and home directroies fast!

Is there a tool for changing the partition sizes of the root and home _without_ destroying the windows data left on the big disk. There is a big load of space spare which has bever been used. I would rather not re-install everything from scratch again.

as you're in mandrake, you can use diskdrake to resize your partitions howver you want. you should acutally ADD a partition instead of resizing your existing ones. mandrkae does this very abstractly and doesn't teach you anything abuot what it's doing, which might be fine if you don't really understand it.

I have diskdrake open, I see the existing partitions, but see no buttons, menus, or anything to change or add them.

'expert mode' shows me details.
There are actions for unmounting, or 'use for loopback' whatever that is?!?

'more' lets me save/restore/rescue a partition table.

ahh, I see, unmount FIRST!

I have now resized...

What type of partition/s do I need to ADD?

how about using the one called 'linux'.. probably a good idea

Hmm. Slightly cynical.
I wasn't sure if Linux wanted different additional partitions for each of the root mount points, home, etc. I understand that different home 'users' can have their home on different drives.
Will just adding a single Linux partition automatically deal with the fact that my root partition is getting full, even though my home partition has reasonable space??

Sorry if this seems basic, Windows or Mac I would know inside out, but not yet Linux...one day though.

fair enough, no you don't *need* a partition for any of them, you just allocate a certain lump of space for a certain area. what you'll want to do is to move something like /usr onto a separate partition, and then when anything else get's installed in the /usr branch of the fs, it'll just go to that other partition. /usr is usually about 80% of the total system, so that should be the biggest partition. Mandrake's disk druid just has a (seemingly) clever way of being able to move a whole load of files over to a different partition based on how you infer they should be mounted. if you create a new ext3 partition and format it and set it's mount location to /usr it *should* ask you if you want to move all the data over to it, and that should be all there is to it. if you've got lots of data in your /home you might prefer to move that as it's less important to the system as a whole just in case anythign were to go wrong.

Richiet, Here is a thread that should be of great interest to you:

http://www.mandrakeuser.org/mub/view...c=5434&forum=3

sluggo