Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[papaschtroumpf]

Does anyone know of FREE partionning software that would allow me to resize a partition by a few gigs so that I can add an ext2 partition to build puppy in?

This would have to be non-destructive, i.e. resize the existing windows (not sure if it's FAT32 or NTFS, not at that computer atm) without loosing any data.

I know Partition Magic can do that but I can't install it on the target machine.

[danleff]

If you have PartitionMagic on another system, why not make a set of PM floppy rescue disks and boot the system that you want to alter the partitions on with the floppies?

[Flash]

If you have the Partition Magic CD you can boot it and do a lot of stuff without having to install it. I don't know what the limits are but I've used it that way. There's also parted, I think it's called, which is free and, I think, able to resize FAT32 and NTFS partitions. Be very careful though; defrag and back up the partition before you try.

[FrStephen]

I found the following post on the Mepis Lovers forum. I tried it for resizing the single NTFS partion on my antique Toshiba Tecra and Win2000 still runs OK.

Fr. Stephen

"The program I've used on many machines now and that has never once failed me in any task I've given it is the install diskette for BootIt NG. The program for creating the bootable installation diskette can be downloaded here:

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootitng.html

Boot your machine with the floppy diskette you create using the download and when the dialog comes up with install, cancel, etc buttons on it, click on the CANCEL button. BootIt will then go into maintenance mode where you can select from a variety of tasks. The one you want is Partition Work. There you can resize your XP partition, partition free space, etc.

After you've resized the XP partition, reboot into XP and XP will see the changed partition size as a new/changed device and will instruct to reboot to make the changes effective - do so. After that, all should be well and you can proceed to partition the drive space you've freed up and/or go about installing Mepis in the newly available space."

Assuming you make a swap partition using BootIt, be sure to run mkswap and swapon for that partition - in my case:
mkswap /dev/hda2
swapon /dev/hda2

Puppy runs a lot faster when it has more room to play than just the 82 MB of RAM that my antique offers!