Need partioning help please

[Rollotamasi]

I read the partioning sticky guide but unfortuanetly It didnt really address my current dilema so I'm hoping you folks can help me. I have a HP nx 6110 laptop that I would like to dual boot between windows and more thank likley either knopix/foresight or unbutu. The laptop already has windows XP sp2 installed on a 60g partion (NTFS) What I would like to do is to have 2 10g "System" partions. one will hold linux, the other windows. And then I would like to have a community 40 gig partition for stoarge.

I went an downloaded partion logic. WOW is all I have to say. I really dont think I call pull off resizing the partions without complete biffing my windows install. Is there another free partion manager that uses some sort of graphical representation to show where data currently is?

I'm REALLY trying to get around having to re-install windows. I have a lot of little downloaded programs that I doubt I could find again and cant really afford to loose. Can anyone out there help me?

[genesus]

get partition magic from a p2p network...or get the qtparted live cd, works amazingly

[Thinker]

Hi Rollotamasi,
You can get QtParted with Knoppix Live CD. But I would suggest you to download SystemRescueCD from the following link : -

http://www.sysresccd.org/Download

Just download and burn the right .ISO for your system to a CD and you get a bootable CD with a number of useful file system utilities which will come handy later.

QtParted is a clone of PartitionMagic. I used QtParted in my laptop (IBM ThinkPad T42) for resizing NTFS partition. Didn't face any problem at all.

With Regards,
Thinker

[ZeakX]

Just a query Thinker,

I don;t suppose that neat little CD is also able to convert a full NTFS partition to a Fat32? I don;t have anywere else to store its data and it would be usful to rw in both linux and XP.

Cheers
/~ZeakX

[Thinker]

Hi ZeakX,
QtParted is a clone of Partition Magic. It can convert NTFS to FAT32.

But since you want to use both GNU/Linux and Windows XP, I would suggest you to just resize, the NTFS partition to free up sufficient space required for data storage (for both OSes), which can be then formatted as the new FAT32 partition. Because, NTFS is a more secure file system than FAT32.

With Regards,
Thinker