[Leaplist] Partitioning Gurus?

[Chris]

Dan Cherry wrote:

>On Friday 09 February 2007 10:05:45 pm Chris wrote:
>  
>
>>Urrgh - I talked a friend into installing Linux, for which he
>>volunteered his new Dell laptop, as long as he could dual-boot.
>>So I fired up GPartEd, all ready to slice and dice, and saw this:
>>
>>/dev/sda1   fat16   47.03 MiB
>>/dev/sda2   ntfs    104.99 GiB
>>unallocated            7.84 MiB
>>/dev/sda3   extended   2.00 GiB
>>   /dev/sda5  fat32   2.00 GiB
>>/dev/sda4   fat 32   4.74 GiB
>>
>>Apparently, Dell hase all kinds of really wonderful stuff that
>>just has to chew up the available partitions. Thank you, Dell.
>>I don't know what these are there for - I suspect the fat16
>>is for some Dell Diag utility - and one of the fat32s is
>>probably for Ghost? - No clue.
>>
>>Any suggestions that won't kill his existing functionality?
>>While I'm in there, I'd like to sneak in a fat32 partition for
>>files he'll use in both systems.
>>
>>Cheers,
>>
>>Chris
>>    
>>
>
>If you were planning on shrinking the ntfs partition, you should be able to 
>steal enough from it to give him a 10, 20, maybe even 50 GB partition(s) for 
>Linux.  And a couple of GB for the fat32 share area could come from the same 
>area.  That should give a nice safe proof of concept.  If he likes it, then 
>he (or you) can further determine what you want to eliminate or shrink.
>
>  
>
I'm probably confused, but i thought that the gods of rotating
media had decreed that hard drives could have only four
primary partitions - and that only one of those could be
an extended partition. Dell seems to have chewed that up.

I'd love to hear otherwise?

>I would think that would be safer than removing something that might be part 
>of the Dell mystery partitions.  
>
>You probably already know this, but if you do decide to shrink the ntfs 
>partition, make sure you use a utility that can properly move the fixed ntfs 
>sectors, such as partition magic 8(or higher).
>
>  
>
Is GPartEd NSFNTFS (Not Safe Fer NTFS - I couldn't resist
the acronym)?

Cheers,

Chris