Changing the hard drive space on Windows XP and Ubuntu 9.04 partitions?

[Cedo]

I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my latop. I have an older 80 gig HP laptop with Windows XP. Currently, i have XP as the NTFS drive and it takes up about 72 gigs of space, the swap drive for ubuntu is about 256 MB and the ext-3 drive is 2.5 gigs. However, i have no more hard drive space to run or instal any programs on Ubuntu. So what i need to do is decrease the NTFS drive as i still have over 30 gigs of free space on my laptop and increase the ext3 drive to about 10 or 15 gigs and increase the swap drive? How can i do this? Any recommendations? Thanks.

[oz]

Welcome to the forums!

If it were me... I'd defrag and backup Windows, then use the Parted Magic LiveCD to shrink the Windows partition giving you some unallocated space, then use Parted Magic again to expand the Linux partitions.

[jayd512]

Hello and Welcom!

I agree with ozar, but would add one little thing.
Depending on the amount of RAM in your system, you may not even need to expand your swap. If you have, say, around 2 GB RAM you should be okay.
If anything, I would make swap a max of 512.

[Zeroangel]

GParted is capable of shrinking and growing partitions without destroying the data that's already on the partitions -- but the program advises you backup the data on the partitions before attempting to do so.

A temporary solution would be to put some of your files on another partition, and then just symbolically link that folder to your home folder.