Creating new disk partitions ?

[guadalmina]

I have mandrake 9.1 installed on hdb.
hda is entirely windows xp apart from the bootloader.
Both hard drives are 80 gig.
I have a lot of unused capacity on hdb (about 90%) Most of which is at hdb6.
I want to use some of the spare part of hdb6 to create a new partition which i want to format as fat32 so that i can read and write files between both linux and winxp.
I don't wish to destroy any of the data on the hdb6 sector in the process. How do i go about this?
Roly

[fingal]

There is a utility in Linux distros called cfdisk. You need to open a Linux shell to use this, and you must be root http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/cfdisk.txt

The potential for screwing this up is huge if you haven't used it before. It's an ncurses (text based) front end and I *think* it can handle fat32. Please back up your data before even thinking about doing anything with this

If you prefer a more gui approach http://qtparted.sourceforge.net is recommended. I've never booted Linux from XP, so there may be a range of other issues for you to deal with. As long as Windows is on the master hd then you should be able to pull this off

[sdousley]

you do however need to note that if you just run

cfdisk

it will default to partition /dev/hda

If it's not hda u want to partition, you need to add the device u wamma partition after the cfdisk command, like if i need to partition my hdc i do:

cfdisk /dev/hdc