partitioning trickiness on powerbook (lombard)

[amarodeeps]

Hey Folks,

This isn't exactly a Gentoo question, but more of a 'pre-Gentoo' question...

I just bought a used powerbook off of this guy, it has a 6 gig hard drive with os 9.2.2 on there now. It has a lot of software on there that I want to keep--Photoshop, a nifty astronomy program called Starry Night, etc.--but here's the problem: he didn't have any of the disks for the software, and he didn't give me a system disk for os 9.2.2. So, while I would like to install Gentoo on this machine (apparently there is about 4 gigs free even with all the software on there now) I don't want to wipe the hard drive first; I would like to resize the partition as it is now.

Unfortunately, from what I can tell, I'm going to have to pay $80+ to get a utility that will let me do a non-destructive resizing of the partitions, and I don't have the cash (plus I'm a cheap bastard). So I guess that's my first question: is there really no free software that will let me do a non-destructive resizing of HFS and HFS+ partitions?

Second question: I had some idea that I could use dd (or something) and this external scsi hard drive (4 gigs) that the guy gave me with the laptop, but I don't know exactly how to go about it. Any ideas? Any way at all I could copy the current data over to another drive, repartition this one, then copy the os 9 partition back (but smaller...)?

If you think there is a better place for me to ask these questions let me know; I know these aren't really gentoo or even linux questions, but I'd really appreciate any help, and I promise I'll start asking gentoo-related questions as soon as I've got this worked out.

Dave

[Gerk]

There are no free resizing utils, and even the commercial one's aren't great in my experience...

For mac OS 9.2.2 you can easily copy all of your stuff to the external drive though. Drag and drop.. that simple. Just make sure you drag the whole internal drive icon to the external one (so it wont miss things like your desktop whichis a hidden folder). Then repartition and drag it all back, easy as that.

Gerk

[amarodeeps]

Gerk! Thank you!

I feel like a dumbass now, actually, I just didn't know you could do that with mac os 9.

I did exactly as you suggested: I hooked up my external scsi drive to the powerbook; copied over the hard drive (drag and drop); set that drive up to be the boot drive; did the partitioning; copied the stuff back over, voila! Easy as pie.

Thanks again for the help!

Dave

[Gulliver]