Partitioning round 2

[GreenCountry]

Hi all,

ok, so i've done the whole partitioning and dual boot thing with my linux mandrake. did total 4 partitions: windows, /, /home, and swap. /home is by far the biggest, with about 22 GB.

but now i want a new partition to try out different OSs: right now it's BeOS, but god forbid should that project completely perish, maybe others, including different linux flavors. how can i go about safely splitting my /home partition? or is it all over and i should just back up the data on /home and split it, knowing i'll lose everything?

by the way, /home is mostly empty, i can split it in a way that i know i left enough cylinders for the actual existing data... but what i dunno is to what extent files are fragmented over the partition and to what extent splitting it would cause me to lose some data... i've heard that no one uses the few defragmenting progs there are, but is this one of the times i should maybe use one? if yes, which one?

any help appreciated. thanks!

[bdg1983]

Backup any data you have in /home and then use either Partition Magic, Parted (available at freshmeat.net) or some of the other partitioning tools out there. It shouldn't be that hard to do.

When your done, just remember to make any modification in /etc/fstab (or whatever Beos uses) to reflect the partition change.

[GreenCountry]

ok so wait though, cuz in a previous linux life i deleted a windows partition and then created a new one of smaller size and it screwed everything up, i had to start from scratch... then i realized there was the "resize FAT partition" option...

but that option doesn';t show up with ext2fs partitions... so do i just delete the /home partition and create two new ones of smaller size? in other words, was this SNAFU i had with windows a property of the FAT partition that won't happen with ext2fs? or is there a special way i should be "resizing" the ext2fs partition as well...?

thanks again!

[x]

If you delete a partition and then create new ones, the partition ID might have changed.
If, for instance, your / is hda6 and you delete hda5 and then create a new partition your / will reside on hda5, the new partition will be the last.
If that happens, boot from bootdisk, CD or whatever, specify at the boot-prompt: linux root=/dev/hda5
Then change /etc/fstab and everything should be fine.
Apart from that I can't see any problems with changing the partitioning scheme?