Really good program. I have version 8 though, and it's a lot better than 7. You can edit your partitions from the windows program, then restart your computer, and it will do the actually repartitioning for you before it loads Windows back up.

But if you have a clean hard drive or want to erase everything on the drive, create the rescue disks. Next time you want to repartition something, pop them in your floppy drive and boot off of them. A DOS program will show up letting you configure your partitions and do it from outside of Windows or Linux or whatever OS you happen to be running. (Also helpful if you're not yet running an OS but about to run an operating system setup program)

I played with a couple of editions of Mandrake Linux some time ago. The DiskDrake partitioning tool featured a nice graphic interface that made it really easy to set up the drive the way I wanted it and it didn't destroy any of my existing win 98 partition i had at the time.

The cavet was that it strongly recomended that you defrag your hard drive under windows before proceding. Doing that in the case of win 98 shoved all of the data to the "front" of the drive leaving the "back" of the drive empty and ready to be partitioned off.

DiskDrake also has a simple one button solution to setting a basic system up with the recomended "system" (ok i'm rusty on my terms here) swap, and usr partition sizes automaticly set for you which you can fine tune after the fact if you wish.

DiskDrake comes as part of the Mandrake package and I imagine that it could be downloaded by itself as well.

I'm trying to get some space off my d drive and add that amount to the c drive but failing.There's a man with a hammer standing at the bottom of the interface asking whether to "resize" a partition or not.I didn't choose that.I choosd -> operations -> resize.I resized from d and made a new (f) partition consisting of 164.7mb of space just to merge with the c drive.I tried to make the new partition as fat,fat32,logical and primary but when I try to merge that drive with my c drive,i don't see the f drive available.Is there any other way to increase the size of my c drive ? If I click the hammer person and enter my desired c drive size , it works.Inside partition magic i see the drive size as par my wish but from my computer,the size hasn't changed at all.when i try to get out of partition magic a message asks me to finish the pending work.If i click on yes a message says im using the evaluation version of partition magic 7.0 and that's it no change.I'm really poor what should I do now ?

Let BIG"B" jump in here for a sec. A few questions and suggestions.
1) What kind of installation method will you be taking

• ISO Image from HDD?
• ISO Image from Disk?
  or
• FTP installation?

(suggestion)Partitioning
I would use FIPS Version 2.0
FIPS is a program for non-destructive splitting of harddisk partitions.
http://www.igd.fhg.de/~aschaefe/fips/fips.html
(Easy Suggestion) Reinstall windows and create a seperate partition for *nix with windows. 5-6 Gig if your wanting to just play around.

Or you could download the disk images for Partition Magic 8.0 here:

http://www.geekis-kahn.net/PM.rar

Extract that file, and you'll have 2 new files, which are the self-extracting disk images.

Ok.If I delete the d partition and install linux in there,what should be the file system ? fat32/ext3/ext2?

Will I be able to see my d drive's linux files while operating in windows ?

the partitions needed:-

1./ -1gig
2./boot - 300 mb
3./swap - 512mb ( 512mb ram)
4./dev -don't know ( do I really need to make that partition ?)
5./usr - don't know ( Do I really need to make that partition?)

answer me this question then I'll format the d partition...

If you're installing Linux, the filesystem choices are either ext2, ext3, or ReiserFS. FAT32 is WINDOWS ONLY.

The only partitions you *should* need to create are / and /swap. The other directories are normally created by the install, unless you're installing one of the BSD's or some other flavor of UNIX, which mounts them on slices (partitions in Linux.)

If you are looking to access files on your Linux partition while using Windows, you'll need a third-party utility to do this. You can, however, read and write files to your Windows partitions while in Linux if your Windows filesystem is FAT32. If you use NTFS, then you'll have READ-ONLY access to your Windows files (well, OK, you technically _can_ write to NTFS from Linux, but it's not advised, as you can hose your Windows install.)

As far as the layout you want for your Linux partitions, your /swap partition should be roughly 1 1/2 times the amount of your physical RAM. That being said, if you're installing RedHat, I believe it will automatically suggest the sizes for the needed partitions. I could be wrong on this, since I've never installed RedHat. I know that Slackware, Debian, and FreeBSD offer suggestions on the partition sizes.

In summation, the only partitions you should have to create would be / and /swap, and it is recommended that you do this from within the RedHat installation, as opposed to using Partition Magic to do this. If you do it yourself, create the /swap partition FIRST, and make sure to create it at the END of the logical drive.

Good Luck!

Oh, here's a link to an online version of Linux Unleashed! that might offer some help:
http://prognosis.lib.ece.ntua.gr/dim...3/055-057.html

Well its been years since I have dual-booted windows/RH.
During most installations *nix will ask you at the begining if you want to

• Install over existing partitions
• Install on available partitioned space.

Partition magic gives you choices on which type of space is needed. Choose the one for *nix. It will ask you if the partitioned space is for NT or *nix atleast the full version does.

(suggestion)That way its all cut and dry and you wont get all confused with

• primary partition
• extended partitions
• logical
• cyclinders
• blah blah blah...

So I would suggest for a new *nix user to either create the partitions inside of windows during install or with a partition tool.

I would either use the Linux partitioning tool inside setup (i.e. Disk Druid) or Partition Magic. It's okay to create partitions during Windows 2000/XP setup but I would not create or modify any partitions while inside Windows. (I guess I just don't trust it with so many other processes running at the same time as hard drive maintenance)

I dunno about your Redhat but Fedora 1 which is similar comes with FIPS for partitionsing