I’m trying to make my WIN XP system dual-boot with Red Hat LINUX 7.3.
I understand that I need to reduce the space of my one big NTFS partition that has XP on it, and leave the newly unpartitioned disk space unpartitioned so that the LINUX installation program will make it’s own partition there.
There doesn’t seem to be any way to reduce a partition in XP; the XP Disk Management doesn’t have this function as far as I can tell.
On the Red Hat LINUX installation disks there’s a utility called FIPS for just such a purpose, but it doesn’t work with NTFS, only FAT and FAT32.
I understand there’s a program out there called Partition Magic, but I’d rather not spend any money on this project.
Is there some way to reduce this partition size without spending any money, like within XP or a free utility?
The only two choices that you have, I believe, are buying PartitionMagic, or starting again and fdisk-ing into two partitions (3 including the swap file, but RedHat’s installation will do that for you). Of course, you will lose everything and have to reinstall XP.
BTW, Linux can’t reliably read/write NTFS, only read, so if you reinstall XP you may want to choose FAT32 so that you can get to your data. Conversely, there are utilities that allow Win32 operating systems to mount EXT2 drives, such as Linux drives. I’m not sure about EXT3, RedHat’s default I believe, but EXT3 is supposed to work with all EXT2 tools, so you should be OK.
When push comes to shove, you can always backup all the personal data, then start from scratch.
Make one for XP, one for common data, and one for *nix. You probably want to partition the space for *nix further, somewhere between 4 to 7 (including swap).
This thread mentions a free program from here. Note: The page says older versions can trash the drive for anything but FAT partitions. It seems that the current version works, but always make a backup first anyway.