help! partition mess

[bigvoo]

I had puppy installed on this old p-3 dell laptop, I let puppy do the partitions on auto, and after a few weeks puppy had a catastrophic fail, so I decided to install zenwalk, it wouldn’t install, so I had a look at the partitions from a live session... ( just so you know, I already destroyed hda3, which may have been a huge mistake, but I wanted to resize hda1...I don’t know why puppy made hda1 so tiny and then made hda3 so huge...it wasn’t beeing used at all... btw the 13.74gb unallocated WAS hda3 ext 3... also isn’t xfs not linux ? Any help on this much appreciated.

/dev/hda1 xfs 3.91gb 10.17 boot

/dev/hda2 linux-swap 1004.07mb

unallocated 13.74gb

[oz]

If you aren't familiar with command line partitioning, the Parted Magic LiveCD can make easy work of it with its GUI interface. You'll need free space adjacent to any partition that you want to expand in size, so that means you will have to shrink some partitions, or move them to create free space next to the partition that you want to enlarge.

[bigvoo]

thanks ozar, I use gparted all the time, and I lke it ok, it's just I have never seen what's going on here...it won;t let me resize hda1...only delete. is it ok to delete hda1 ? it has the boot flag on it. and what about linux swap ? can i just delete it ? it's just weird how...they put the swap in between hda1 and hda3, insted of at the end like it is on all my other comps. is there nay danger in just deleting them all ? and starting all over formatting ? this is an old copmuter that im not worried about at all...is the grub stored on the hard drive or the bios ? thanks

[oz]

It doesn't really matter where the swap partition is. If it were me, I'd use gparted to delete them all, then create partitions of the size you want and where you want them. Then when you go to install Linux, direct the installer to use those partitions.

[bigvoo]

I deleted all partitions and reformatted them, zenwalk iunstalled and boots, but ::::: is it normal for both hda1 and hda3 to have /mount -- looking at this in gparted it looks to me ( newbie ) that they are 2 completely different primarty partitions, fo rsome reason gparted will not allow any resizing or moving... any help on this appriciated.

[Zeroangel]

If you want to modify partitions you should boot into a liveCD and run gparted from there. You wont be able to mess with partitions that are currently in use.

Also, with 3GB being used. Its probably best to start from scratch. I'd say you'd need 30GB for linux and your documents, and maybe a small to medium sized music library. Believe me, even on 10GB, you're gonna be hurting for space somewhere down the road, even if your music and movies arent stored on that partition.