[Bill Conway]

I recently purchased a HP Pavilion. It comes with an 80 GB hard drive with NTFS
and an XP OS. I also purchased a new copy of Partition Magic (version 8). I wish to partition my C-drive into two partitions of 40 GB each. I want XP in one and to install Linux in the other. However Partition Magic (PM) wont't allow me to resize the existing drive. I suspect that I'll have to back up the C-drive to my Buslink external hard drive and delete the existing partition on my C-drive, create a new
40 GB partition on the now empty C-drive, and copy the back-up into it. However I fear all kinds of bad things might happen if I delete the C-drive's partition. What will run the computer if I wipe out its OS? Also Boot Magic remians a mystery: at what point do I install it (it tells me it requires a FAT32 partition) and where? Thanx for your assistance - Bill

[Advertisements]

As long as you have the following:

1. A working CD install of Windows XP
2. A working copy of a Linux distro

you shouldn't have any issues. Best bet is if you have bother of these skip with the Partition Magic bit and install XP FIRST and during the install be sure that you specify the amount (40GB) of disk space you wish to use.

After XP is installed you would then load your Linux distro and depneding on which on you choose it SHOULD give you the option to leave the current area allocated to Windows alone and use whats left to create it's root and swap partitions. Some distros are a little easier than others at this.

I can tell you from experience that SUSE, Xandros, Fedora, and Mandriva WILL do this and are very easy to install.

The trick is to install Windows XP FIRST and to specifically tell it to only use 40GB of space.

Linux will load it's boot loader (LILO or GRUB, both work fine) and you will get an option to load either Linux (default) or your WIndows OS.

[thenotch]

As long as you have the following:

1. A working CD install of Windows XP
2. A working copy of a Linux distro

you shouldn't have any issues. Best bet is if you have bother of these skip with the Partition Magic bit and install XP FIRST and during the install be sure that you specify the amount (40GB) of disk space you wish to use.

After XP is installed you would then load your Linux distro and depneding on which on you choose it SHOULD give you the option to leave the current area allocated to Windows alone and use whats left to create it's root and swap partitions. Some distros are a little easier than others at this.

I can tell you from experience that SUSE, Xandros, Fedora, and Mandriva WILL do this and are very easy to install.

The trick is to install Windows XP FIRST and to specifically tell it to only use 40GB of space.

Linux will load it's boot loader (LILO or GRUB, both work fine) and you will get an option to load either Linux (default) or your WIndows OS.

[Optikal]

want free partitioning, just use mandrakes intallation disk if you want to repartition your drive,
and you dnt need to install linux to use it..
boot from the first cd an skip past the langauge, license agree an keyboard layout. When it asks,
choose to do a fresh install then continue until you come to the partition wizard.. Choose
'custom disk paritioning', click next an you're into an excellent GUI-based organiser..
no changes are made untill you click done, an you'r prompted again before they are written to disk..
at that point just abandon the installation by rebooting the machine..
the prog displays different drives on different tabbed pages and,
while it uses standard linux nomenclature to identify devices,
it also does its best to identify partitions with the windows C:, D:, E: lettering system too..(this was a text sent to my friend i had saved, works fine though an its relatively easy)