Ok, so despite some initial distatest for SuSE 9.1 Personal (mostly surrounding the lack of some essential packages - gcc for example), things are going really well. I think this is a really strong operating system, and YaST is awesome for installing software.

Problem is, I'm sharing this tiny hard drive with a Windows XP installation on an NTFS volume. I've already "borrowed" the fonts from the XP installation, and I'm ready to ditch redmonds wares after about four weeks of Linux.

How would I go about expanding my Linux partition and removing the Windows partition? Is there an open source (read, free) tool to do this, or do I need to purchase Partition Magic?

the easiest way to do this is to delete the Win partition and create a Linux partition in it's place. Unlike windows which has to have it's core system files on the first partition of your hard drive Linux can have it's system files any where on the drive and as long as the boot loader points to the right place it works. Since you are already running SuSE I'm going to say your boot loader is set up right.

So to do what you want open up YaST, click on the "System" tab then choose the partitioner.

Find the Windows partition, it should be listed as /dev/hda1 and click the "delete" button

Now click on the "Create" button choose to format the partition and choose a Linux partition type, I'd reccomend eather riser or JFS but if you have one you like or one that has been reccomended to you use it.

now you need to choose a mount point. The mount point is just an empty folder on your main Linux partition, it could be something as simple as /new or something like /home/user/Documents/Partitions/Linux/P2 just make sure it is something you can remember.

Click OK then Apply and it will ask you to verify your decisions, click eather apply or OK and Linux will delete you Windows partition and create your new Linux partition.

Before you delete your Windows partition make sure everything you need from it is backed up

HR, thank you very much for your input. I'd prefer to have a contiguous partition, since this drive is so small. I see the option to resize a partition, but there is a note that you cannot change the start point of a partition. I'm assuming that this pretty much means I'm stuck with doing something along the lines of what you've stated. I guess it can't hurt to ask the question though. I've included a screenshot of my YaST partition management screen below.

http://www.bradlanders.com/linux/sus...management.jpg

Is there any way I can resize my / partition and move it to the start of the drive?

If there is not, I will probably be wiping this installation completely and giving Mandrake 10.0 a try, which I intend to do at some point. I'm still a bit dissapointed that SuSE decided to omit gcc and make from the Personal distribution, and I haven't figured out how to get make on my machine yet :\

add this FTP to your installation sources:

ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/9.1/suse/i586

this will give you access to EVERY package that comes with Suse professional. THe first time you go into Yast with this new source,it may take as much as 5 minutes for everything to show up, as there is a lot of information to load. But when it's done, just search for gcc and make. They'll be in Yast and you can install from the FTP site.

In windows install PowerQuest Partition Magic.
Create boot disks, and boot your box from newly created disks...
Remove, format, move expand, Create, etc... partitions as you wish for all your hard drives.....

Hope this helps, bye Kess...

Awesome, thanks I had added ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/9.1/, but I didn't have /suse/i586 in the URL.

Well, my experience with Mandrake 10.0 didn't go all that well. YaST is a lot better than the Mandrake configuration utility (forgot the name).

I have an old version of Partition Magic, but it doesn't work on Windows XP :\ I may just start over from scratch and take some notes, because I'm worried that I may have made a mess of some things with an RPM I installed that was for 9.0 (accident), but then uninstalled. I have gcc installed, but I got compile errors when running a ./config file for a program I was trying to install.