[loony_taz00]

Ok, Like it says in the title i want to run either linux or Windows on my computer... I have C:/ right now.. and E:\ both completly different hard drives... C:\ is for all system files and E:\ is for storage.. I want to make it so that i can put linux on the C:\ but it only has 1 partition... So.. can i make a 5gig partition. on it without formatting the hard drive? If so How?

[CouchMaster]

Partition Magic will resize C: without harming anything already on it.

[gotrootdude]

Why not use the VMware player to run linux on windows.

[loony_taz00]

I tried that partition magic thing 8.0 and it came up with an error 983 batch executed error.... error... whats wrong?

[jiml8]

Most linux distros can automatically handle a partition resize when you do the installation. This is a very common situation in the Linux world.

Presuming of course that you have enough free space on the partition.

[saikee]

ALways defrag the partition before resizing it.

[jiml8]

Originally Posted by saikee

ALways defrag the partition before resizing it.

Later versions of ntfsresize (which is what the graphical and installer tools on most distros use) will take care of this for you. Some versions can be set to automatically defrag for you, and any of the later versions (don't remember where the cutoff is) will refuse to shrink an NTFS partition to a size that wipes out any of the data in the partition.

Nonetheless, you should certainly defrag first, anyway.