1st post....did I do this correctly?

[vsick]

First post!

Sorry if I sound like a newb because I am.

Tried searching for this but haven't able to turn up anything or want to be sure I am not formatting my disk.

So I just set up Dual boot Fedora8/XP.

XP is setup on 1 HD
Fedora8 is setup on another HD (300GB)

Everything boots fine to by liking......I installed fedora8 using the default disk options. So it formatted the 300gb and installed fedora8 on one single partition.

I am trying to figure out how to create a second partition on the 300gb harddrive so that windows and linux can access/write to it, probably has to be fat32 right?.

Is there a way to do this without re-formatting the 300gb HD and doing it in the installer? I realize that is what I should have done in the first place when I ran the installer for fedora8.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

[coopstah13]

you can download software called PartedMagic and use that to resize your current partition and create a second one, you can use ntfs and have write access in linux using ntfs-3g because fat system sucks

[Jonathan183]

Welcome to the forums !

You can use the PartedMagic CD to resize/create/delete partitions. You can use ntfs-3g driver to read/write to ntfs partitions. Personally I like to use a separate data partition and have tended to use FAT32 for this in the past (before I knew about ntfs-3g).

[nmap_0001]

first you can use cfdisk it will give you a view of your current partition layout
you will see your root partion and swap partion, decide how much do you need
formula is 1.5-2xRAM and like you say you used default installtion method depending how much ram you have linux automaticly calculate swap .But you can reduce it to smaller size, but you need to delete first and install whathever you whant.
dont worry linux will boot even withaot a swap .
Then you must use cfdisk create your swap again and that is.
You can choose not to have swap like a partition, you can create a swap file and linux will used.No problem.
Warning:dont do it if you dont understand process.
And use a Fedora am Debian fen if this is difficult for you reinstall.