Botched partitioning

[ericc2007]

I am a brand-new Linux user with no experience.

tell me right away if I should post this in the mandriva section.

Upon installation (ACPI disabled installation) of Mandriva Free 2007 on my brand new Averatec 2370 laptop with AMD64 dual-core, I was given various options to partition the hard drive. I chose to re-size the windows partition. Somewhere along the line, the partitioning wizard wouldn't let me continue and told me to run both chkdsk and defrag from within windows first. I then did run chkdsk, but did not run defrag. Not running defrag didn't seem to matter though, as the installer then let me continue. The partitioning and the installation completed successfully, and soon I had both windows and linux up and running.

The problem is that I only gave windows the minimum amount of space to run, "6050" in my case, and now of course windows has no space to work with, not even enough to be able to run it's system recovery utility, definitely not enough to add any new programs. It thinks the hard drive is full.

I have tried to re-size the partition again, but the Mandriva partitioning wizard says the disk is now too fragmented, and says I need to run defrag. I have run defrag several times, and windows even says the disk does not need to be defragmented, but still, the wizard says to defrag. I am thinking that perhaps when I set up a few basic things in windows (The security suite, and other similar programs that came with it) that that fragmented the drive enough to upset mandriva. Other than that I have left everything on the windows partition untouched.

Since then I have re-installed mandriva, using the same partitioning (After I saved a binary and corrupted KDE itself, it seems). I have noticed that mandriva now seems to think it has fewer partitions available to it than it did on the first install.

What must/can I do?

Furthermore, I have thought it a good idea to back up the windows partition. I have found some kind of backup utility in windows, but I do not know if a disc created from it will actually be able to fully re-install windows, if the windows partition on the hard drive is deleted. My machine's BIOS doesn't give me options about what partition to boot from, only whether to boot from the hard drive period, or other drives. I suppose I could go ahead and make the disc (Any suggestions on how to test it?) but I don't think I'll try to repartition again until I know I have it fully backed up.

[cheesecake42]

is the mandriva partition working correctly? if so, i would use another linux distro's instalation disk and resize the windows partition that way, or install gparted on linux and use it to resize it (gparted is kind of like a linux "partition magic")