I've heard of lots of programs that can 'safely' resize your partition without losing data. I'm not sure whether to believe that yet. I want to dual-boot XP and a Linux system, but currently the XP partition takes up the entire disk, so I have to either format the disk or resize the partition. Before, on another computer, I installed a 'partitionless' RedHat dist. It only booted when I put the rescue floppy in the drive. Are these partition resizers safe, and can I still dual-boot without a seperate partition?

Quote: Original post by fyhuang
I've heard of lots of programs that can 'safely' resize your partition without losing data. I'm not sure whether to believe that yet. I want to dual-boot XP and a Linux system, but currently the XP partition takes up the entire disk, so I have to either format the disk or resize the partition. Before, on another computer, I installed a 'partitionless' RedHat dist. It only booted when I put the rescue floppy in the drive. Are these partition resizers safe, and can I still dual-boot without a seperate partition?

PartitionMagic has worked for me, I've both shrunk and expanded my partitions without any problems at all (except that my drive letter changed once, but that was easily solved through some remote registry access).

Partitionless install, hm? You can run Linux and Windows on the same partition with several distributions, Slackware is one of them, and I've never had any problems with it.

It is recommended that you do partition your disk however, it has several advantages that I'm too lazy to list, just do it :)

Partition Magic is supposed to be wonderful, but it costs money.

On the free side of the coin, there is GNU Parted, but the downside is that assuming you're using NTFS, you won't be able to resize that partition.

If you're using FAT32, however, you should be ok.

If you really want a partitionless install, and you're mostly wanting Linux in order to get familiar with a UNIX-like environment, then I'd recommend that rather than installing a full distro, you either install Cygwin or get an ISO image of Knoppix or Gnoppix, both of which are live-bootable Linux distributions on CDs. They let you run a full-blown desktop system right from a CD, and they can be great tools if you ever have a problem where you need to boot into something to work on your computer, or you just want to try out Linux without installing it outright.

I've also had success with Acronis O/S Selector when setting up a Win98/NT4 dual boot system on a laptop. Usually, neither O/S will recognise that the other is there and will want to use its active partition.

It split an existing FAT32 partition into 3 without loss of data, and I was then able to convert one to NTFS and the other to FAT16 (which I used to exchange data between the systems).

It also handles multiple boots for you, if you wish, via a simple menu, and recognises most versions of DOS, Windows and Linux/Unix.

Thanks for all your input, guys. I'm not sure about what I'm going to do right now, but I'll probably resize my partition with PartitonMagic.

Just an additional note... QTParted, at least as found on Knoppix 3.4 discs, can resize NTFS partitions. The problem I had with doing that was just that I couldn't resize it as much as I wanted, presumably because of data I couldn't move from the end of the partition to create a new one. It's still worth a shot though, considering it's free, unlike Partition Magic.

-Arek the Absolute