Partition Troubles

[x2eagle18]

I'm having a problem rearranging the partitions on my hard drive and have not been able to find useful information anywhere else - so I was hoping someone here can help me. My hard drive is basically split up like this:

1) A 55 gb primary partition which Windows XP is on
2) A 33 gb extended partition which includes
I) A Linux swap partition
II) An empty partition (which can alternatively be unallocated space)
III) An Ext2 Partition for Fedora Core 6
IV) An NTFS partition for data files
3) A 20 gb primary partition for Windows Vista

When trying to take space away from the XP partition (1), I ended up making the empty partition (II). I actually want that space to go into the NTFS partition (IV), but I have been completely unsuccessful. Any idea how I can merge two partitions on an extended partition?

[Whyzman]

Welcome to Forums!

There's a product called BootIt Ng Check it out here: http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootitng.html

There's also one of our members here Paul Komski who is an expert in this sort of thing...hopefully he'll stop by...

In the meantime, you might want to get ahead of the game and familiarize yourself with the product...

[Paul Komski]

Yep - BootIt Ng (or BiNG as in my sig) should do the trick. Get into its partition work area (from floppy or CD) without setting it up on your hard drive and simply resize the partition to occupy all or some of any adjacent unallocated space.

As long as the Linux distros have not been affected by removing the partition by changing it into unallocated space there should be no problem with "counting" the logical partitions. If that is problematic you might need to create one very small partition (in place of the large one you deleted) just so that the partition count remains the same.

PS It is always wise to backup any important data before using any partitioning utilities.

PPS Also - I obviously haven't yet woken-up properly. In order to add the space to IV you would need to slide (or move) the Fedora partition to be adjacent to the swap partition first (and that will screw up your Fedora installation so if it's important you should make an image of it first since it will need repairing or reinstalling if no longer in its original position). That would leave the unallocated space adjacent to the NTFS IV partition which BiNG should resize with no problem. I should also add that BiNG doesnt do a non-destructive resize of the Linux partitions - only FAT or NTFS ones. Final point is that you don't say how your are organising your multiboot system so please post back before changing structures. With an XP Vista Fedora triple boot I would personally suggest using BiNG or XOSL as the boot manager but that depends on whether Fedora, in particular, is being booted from the MBR or not.

Final point. It looks as if Vista is yet to be installed. Suggest you use BiNG to hide all the other partitions from the Vista Setup. After Vista is running reboot to the BiNG floppy or CD and unhide them. You will then need to adjust the boot management to suit, whether using Vista, XP, GRUB, LILO or BiNG/XOSL. If you can wait to install Fedora till after both windows have been installed into their respective primary partitions it would greatly simplify things. If you intend to use the data partition to be written to from Fedora then I suggest using FAT and not NTFS, which Linux can read but not always write to without corrupting the file system.

[x2eagle18]

Wow, thanks this is great information. Vista has already been installed and I'm doing a triple boot using GRUB. Fedora is not being booted from the MBR - would you still recommend using BiNG or XOSL as the boot manager? I know the partition count will be changed when unallocated space is made, but editing the grub configuration should be no problem.

[Paul Komski]

If all is working from Vista don't mess with it - all in the garden is rosy. I'm not really up to speed with Vista and so I myself would have kept it as a separate entity from the word go since I believe (not sure) that it can in certain circumstances actually utilise the MBR itself. Gong back in time from a new installation of Vista over other OSes has on occasions been problematic I believe.