I had windows in my pc (I still do) and I downloaded Ubuntu Dapper on june 1st. It is great, I like it. I initially took 10Gb from windows space (using gparted from the live cd desktop) and I installed ubuntu in this 10Gb.

/dev/sda1 c: 15Gb
/dev/sda5 d: 50Gb+
/dev/sda6 / 7Gb
/dev/sda7 swap 512Mb
/dev/sda8 /home 2Gb+

But now I plan to use ubuntu as my main operating system, without removing windows completely. What I want to do is to re-arrange things a little bit in my hard drive so that I can have a bigger /home

I'd like to use D's 50Gb as /home, move the existing /home into it, and maintaining there what I already have in D, then expanding / with the current /home of 2Gb, but I have the swap in between.

Any suggestions? How can achieve this, or something similar? I have Partition Magic, so that is an option, just in case you asked. I am not afraid of the CLI or other techi solutions. I do not require the fancy GUIs of pmagic and gparted. I just want to solve me problem.

I am also open to suggestions to change the rearragements I've planned, provided I end up with a greater space for /home. And I am also willing to re-install windows if needed. What I want to maintain is what I currently have in /home, in / and in D. I've already made a few "apt-get install" from the net (500Gb more or less) and I wouldn't like to download all that again.

I would backup the D: partition. Then I would reformat it to be /home, change my home mount point to that new partition and copy the backup to the new home. But pay attention because if you are using windows files there and you just copy then from one side to the other. Keep that in mind cause you might loose the complete filenames. What I would do is create a zipfile w/ everything I have on D: then use fdisk on linux to partition the drive. Create the new file system on the new partition (where D: used to be) and leave the zip file there. Maybe you could use the old home to store those files but it all depends of the kind of data you have there. So a few questions:

1)what do you have on your D:? Movies and pics? Or application data?
2)How much of D: is actually used?
3)Do you have grub/lilo?

1)What do you mean by "application data"? I have a couple of movies, some music. I don't need to backup some things as I already have it in CDs, like most of the music, so 2) the overall size of what I would need to backup should be around 6Gb.
3) Yes, I have grub, as is installed by ubuntu. But I was not planning to touch the /dev/sda1 partition where Windows XP is installed, so I do not think grub will be affected.

Some questions though. Are gparted or pmagic not viable in helping me avoid the backup of 6Gb of data? I think they are able to convert between filesystem types and even resizing partitions without deleting the data.

Also I am more concerned with the / partition. After I am able to have /home in where D is now, I was planning to use the current 2Gb of /home to increase the size of /, but I have the swap in between. And I was planning to do so without loosing the data in the current / partition.

I guess that what I am trying to do is a bit complicated, too ambitious.

Application data like some stuff that would be windows specific, say, some CAD tool files. Right, you dont need to worry about grub then just change it to boot from ubuntu as default. I dont like to use those tools to partition my drives but you can use partition magic or something similar and shrink your windows partition to 7GB and use the rest for your home.

I cant answer the rest of your questions cause I have never tried that. But I would say it might not be possible though I am not sure. What you can do is use your old /home as a /tmp and mount it separate from your /. That is whay I did on my system

good luck.