I have two harddrives, an IBM 20gb and a Western Digital 20gb..
So I've decided heres how I want my partitions:

IBM 20GB
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10gb- winxp NTFS (already done that)
9.5gb- slackware (duh)
512mb- swap (since I have 256mb of ram)
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WESTERN DIGITAL 20GB
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10gb- fat32 (for storing files that can be accessed from winxp and slack)
10gb- /home (for storing linux files,progs etc.)
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Now heres where my problem lies:
I want to partition my hard disks but all the guides already assume your harddisk has unallocated space.. The problem is my harddisks are filled with files important for windows and linux and I dont want to lose the files.. Its too difficult to backup too as the files are like 10gb..
Is it possible to partition my harddisks and arranging the data in the harddisks the way I want accordingly?

Thanks for reading, this is my first post so please be king and generous to the newest n00b in town..

How do you want to partition your disk... You would probably loose data, if you repartition your disk... So maybe you can divide your files into small pieces... Than backup your data to cd's /dvd's... Then you can partition your disk without any fears!

If you are running windows xp you can use partition magic.
You will need to move the files around as you make the partitions but I think that If you plane right you could do that.

Or if your lucky ask a friend with a portable hard drive or something similar to come, take the backup, partition the drives and re-copy the backups. If you can't move your data physically out of the drives (either a portable hard drive or a backup on a cd/dvd) partition magic should do it. Good luck!

Thanks for the help
First I'm going to backup all the important data on a DVD+R or two..
Then I'm going to use partition magic to make the NTFS and FAT32 partitions and leave the rest unallocated for fdisk to create the Slackware, swap and /home partitions..

wish me luck (this is my first linux install!!)