Hi Again, with repeat apologies!
The laptop on which I propose to install Linux has Windows Vista Home Premium pre-installed.
There is one hard drive: 120GB. Partition info according to Vista is:
Vista (C:) 91.2GB free, 104GB total System (S:) 1.41GB free, 1.46GB total
Gentoo finds the HD at /dev/sda, and fdisk gives:
/dev/sda1 Start=1 End=702 Blocks=5,632,000 ID=27 Type=Unknown
/dev/sda2 Start=702 End=893 Blocks=1,536,000 ID=7 Type=HP/NTFS
/dev/sda3 Start=893 End=14894 Blocks=110,050,304 ID=7 Type=HP/NTFS
Presumably (matching on partition size) /dev/sda2 is the 1.4GB "System" partition which Vista identified (dunno what that's for, though; but at least it's a known filesystem type). And of course /dev/sda3 is the Big One, which Vista has all to itself.
And Vista does not see /dev/sda1 at all. This may be something to do with machine boot-up, BIOS config, diagnostics, or the like.
Anyway, my real question is to do with backing Vista into a much smaller corner of /dev/sda3. Perhaps I'll be benign and let it have as much as 40GB to run around in, maybe less, however.
So this means resizing the /dev/sda3 partition, and adding new partiitions in the space released. There shouldn't be problems with the latter, once the former has been done.
But this is the first time I've been anywhere near an NTFS filesystem. While I've done this often enough for DOS/VFAT systems, I don't really know what sort of animal NTFS is, and how kindly it would take to being "downsized".
Still less do I know what tool I should use for the resizing, what dangers to watch out for (I don't really want to zap Vista, since it sould come in handy sometime), nor whether the Linux bootloader )e.g. GRuB) will work smoothly with this setup. Also, will the fact that the partitions do not begin and end on cylinder boundaries (see above fdisk info) matter?
So I'd welcome experienced advice about these and any related issues that need taking care of when installing Linux alongside Vista.
With thanks, Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 26-Aug-07 Time: 20:51:22 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------