Partitioning Hard Drive

[ramlambmoo]

aaaaaarrrrrrrrrrgh god damn i knew linux would be like this..... ok so i\'ve downloaded Red Hat linux (1.7 gig on 256k ADSL.... lol took a little while) and i go to install it.  I\'d previously been a bit frustrated installing linux but alot of people said its alot easier now so im thinking ok... anyway it gets to the part about partitioning your hard drive.  And im thinking ok, its easy it has an automatic partition selection.  So i say yup do that.  Thing is, i want to keep my windows files and have linux as well, in case either screws up.  Problem is linux is incapable of resizing the windows partition so that i can free up space on the hard drive for linux.   So now im getting a bit frustrated because supposedly this is meant to be new easy to use linux and its evidentally not.  But anyway i look on the web for a partition re-sizing program and i download 2, put you have to pay to use them both, so thats useless... wtf should i do?  Does anybody know of free disk partitioning software (that dosnt run in DoS) that i could use?  Its been like 3 hours now and thiss easy to use much better than windows thing is getting ridiculous...

[Foresteer]

Whats wrong with resizing partitions in DOS? DOS isn\'t near as hard as people make it out to be.. and IMO for the real system things DOS is easier then winDOwS

i used to know a good DOS repartition but i cant find it for now :/ i\'ll poke around my gargantuan library of retro software and see if i can find it

[ramlambmoo]

My computer has *issues* with dos program that run full screen.  I suppose DoS is ok, but i would prefer one that wasnt.  I just want an easy to use one, so i dont screw up my hard drive by mistake.

[Tharizdun]

I\'m guessing your windows partition is formatted as NTFS rather than Fat32. Thats a problem in Linux, there are no rock-solid partition resizers that can handle this type of partition yet. I believe there are reliable tools that can handle Fat32, but backups are always recommended.

Under windows I have found PartitionMagic to be excellent, it can detect linuxy types of partitions like ext2, ext3, swap, and reiserfs if I recall correctly. Its the only one I have ever used to resize NTFS ( nt4, win2000 and winxp types, have not tried it with win2003 ) and has never screwed anything up.

If you just want to play with Linux for a while try the Knoppix bootable CD, it will give you a KDE linux desktop with full networking, browser, email, IM client, office applications, image editors, media players, several server applications  and a couple of decent games.

If you want to go ahead with RedHat linux, I would recommend using the Fedora Core releases rather than RedHat 9, which is much older than Fedore Core 3, has less hardware support ( due to older 2.4.x kernel ) and 12 months of known security vulnerabilities due to its end-of-support window.

[miLosh]

i agree, partition magic is the only save way to resize ntfs partitions. as with everything, micro$oft refuses to give out the specs for ntfs, therefor everything for linux needs to get reverse engineered.  even writing on ntfs mounted under linux is not rock-solid and should not be used. it\'s saver to make a fat32 partition for exchanging files between windoze and linux.

as far as i know there\'s a 30day demo available for PM, should suffice for your needs.

and im not sure if you can resize partitions with fdisk under dos without loss of data

[ramlambmoo]

You cant resize with fdisk without wiping it.  I tried partition magic but i think you have to pay to get it to work, theres no free demo.  Either way i couldnt resize my partition, so in the end i just said goodbye to it and formatted it.  Maybe i should have used Fedora Core, as Red Hat was an absolute b****  to install- took me 11 hours to get it all working, due to the virtually non existent hardware support.... In the end i had to Update my BIOS amongst other things to get it to recognise my screen... :\\ .. i was not very impressed.  So much for these new, easy to use linux distros, had exactly the same problems as last time i tried intalling it.  Ill get around  to trying fedora though, and see if its any better.