There are a few different ways to accomplish the task of partitioning your drive, but I do it one way that has proven to be very reliable. You should be aware that as with all things "computer" there is the potential to loose data - even though I just said this process is reliable, I recommend you take the time to back up your data. Prudent folk employ backups. I'm assuming that your Windows is using the NTFS file system. De-frag your drive, twice, before you attempt this re-size operation.

We will be shutting down and rebooting the computer into a "live" linux disc specifically made as a rescue or utility disc. You'll have to go into your BIOS when you reboot and check to boot to CD-ROM in your boot device setting. The System Rescue Disc is a Linux (Gentoo) distribution specifically designed for maintaining and rescuing your data - should that need arise. You can also use this disc to "rescue" or otherwise maintain your Windows installation.

In order to boot to a disk you need to change your boot parameters in your BIOS. [ See Getting into BIOS ]

Please goto http://www.sysresccd.org and download the System Rescue Disk. You will need to burn this .ISO file to a CD in order to use it. It's a quick process unless you are on a dial-up account. If so, I apologize - this disc is better than 100MB so you might want to start the download when you have something else to do for a while.

Upon booting to the System Rescue Disk you will be presented with a prompt, please type the following at that prompt:

menu

Following this you will be presented with a small box with more options. Please arrow right, then down 3 and hit ENTER on System Rescue Disc. Next the OS will boot, just a shell, no fancy GUI.

Now we will begin the process of partitioning your hard drive. Hopefully for your peace of mind, and to laugh in the face of computer error and failure, you have backed up all the data that is important to you. I'll say it again, this process works and I have never lost data, however, prudent folk employ backups.

At the prompt type: run_qtparted

Choose your mouse, PS/2 just choose #3.

wait for it -- wait...

You are in qtparted. It's not too fancy, but then again it's just a utility. Click hda on the left-top of your screen - now look right...

In the right section of the window you have a graphical representation of your hard drive as well as a list of all your partitions beneath it. If you have only one partition, as this tutorial assumes, then you will only have one line.

Please right-click on the line of text that describes your partition. You will see a menu list (just like in Windows) appear with command options. Choose "re-size".

In qtparted you must now "commit" the task.

In the menu bar under the heading "Device" please choose "commit", tell it yes, and watch in technicolor-amazement as your hard drive is re-sized.

I don't know how many programs you have installed on your computer so I cannot begin to guess what size to recommend you shrink your partition to. A reasonable guess would be to shrink your Windows partition to 10GB. I am assuming that your kids do not have 13 games installed on the hard drive, if your box is multi user at all, and that you have the usual assortment or riffraff that the vendors like to add to their machines. Being the responsible and smart computer user that you are you have already decided how big your Windows partition needs to be. It's always better to err on the side of caution in these matters. Carpenters like to say, "measure twice, cut once."

When this quick process is complete, you will be left with plenty of room on your large hard drive to create more partitions in order to install Linux. Now, as with Windows, there are myriad methods and reasons to make any number of partitions. For example, when I ran Windows, I bought an extra hard drive to contain the Windows swap file. Windows runs better when it accesses swap from a partition other than C:\. Best if that is on another hard drive all together.

With Linux, and specifically how you will use Linux, you have too many partitioning schemes to consider. There are camps that partition their drives based on their backup strategies, which is important to consider. If you plan to serve up web sites or run a home LAN with 7 users - if you're into making movies...if you just wanna surf the web and make pretty cards for all of your relatives at their birthdays - you'll set up your partitions differently depending on how you use your computer. My guinea pig box is just a simple desktop that serves up web sites, so I partition it thus.

Whereas on some of my hard drives I have 7 or 8 partitions, on my guinea pig box I have 4 primary partitions on my master drive. This box is not dual-booting - it's strictly Linux. However, it used to be a dual-boot machine. In this tutorial we only make 3 more partitions reflecting the same 4 primary partitions. If you've got the RAM (1GB or better), you don't need swap thus you only need to make 2 partitions. Go ahead and make an extra one just to have 4 if you want...call it "refuse" and save all of your old Windows data to it.

Let's make some partitions. After you re-sized your Windows partition (you shrunk it) you will notice that now you have 2 entries for your hard drive. You will see that one of them says free space. Right click on that entry and choose "create from the menu".

In the resulting box you will choose how large and what type of file system to make the partition. This partition is for your / (root) Linux partition so let's make it 10GB (doubtful that you'll ever use it up). You can just manipulate the number that is already in the size box.

Choose to make this a Primary partition and also choose to use the ext3 file system. You can call this whatever you want in the Label section, but I just call it what it is, "/".

Do the same thing for your next partition however you are going to use the bulk of your remaining free space for this one. This partition will be your /home partition, as such you need to make it large. In Linux you are not given the destructive free-reign that you are given in Windows. This is for a good reason and it is one of the many reasons why Linux is far more stable and secure than your Windows. You can't really muck your system up too badly as a regular user. This means that the only files that you are allowed privileges over are the ones in your own /home/user directory. This is a good thing.

If your drive is 60GB and you've already devoted 10GB each to Windows and /, then you will make your /home partition 39.5GB. This is assuming you have 256 to 512MB of RAM and we need a swap partition. Swap is at least double your physical RAM, so adjust all of these partition sizes accordingly. Go through the same procedure to create your /home partition; primary partition, file system, label, size, et al.

The remaining space will be devoted to the Linux-Swap partition. If you have a 60GB drive you have about 500MB left over so that's the size of SWAP. As I wrote earlier, if you have 1GB or better of RAM you don't need a SWAP file. Go ahead and create the swap partition now.

For a 60GB drive with 4 primaries including the swap and 512 MB of RAM this is how I might set up the hard drive:

   Device    Boot      Partition Size	Partition	System
/dev/hda1     *           10GB		NTFS		Windows
/dev/hda2                 10GB		/     - ext3	Linux
/dev/hda3              	  19GB		/home - ext3	Linux
/dev/hda4                 1GB		Swap		Linux

OK - you've re-sized your partition, committed it, and now you've just made 3 more partitions. go ahead and "commit" this action. After you are finished you will see that the original rectangular representation of your hard drive now has 4 divisions of various sizes within it. Terrific - the house didn't explode, your car still works, life is sweet. Shake it off.

When you have finished the only thing left to do is to reboot to install Linux (Debian). It is OK, though, if you want to reboot to go back into Windows. After all you did save it and I can respect your reasons for maintaining Windows. Well, some of them anyway. The important thing is that you have performed an administrative task on your computer. Light 'em up if you've got 'em.

Next, I will write a tutorial showing you how to install the last Operating System you will ever use (on an x86 platform, anyway), Debian.

machiner 23 Apr 05  Discuss in Forum

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