dual booting with mandrake + windows-xp + gentoo

[gabor]

hi,

i want to install gentoo on my computer...
for now, i have the following partitions:(i have 1 72GB harddisk)
8 GB... windows (fat32)
5 GB ... /
500 MB .. swap
59 GB ... /home

maybe not the best partitioning but it worked for me...

now i have windows xp + mandrake9 ( cooker ) on this computer, and i want to install gentoo somehow...

my idea was that, somehow i cut 5GB from the /home partition, and put gentoo there...

and i would share the /home partition with mandrake and gentoo..

2 questions:

1. is there a reliable way to cut a partition into 2 parts... i have 40GB of anime on that /home and i REALLY don't want to lose it

2. is it possible to create the configuration i'm talking about?

thanks,
gabor

[yokem55]

This depends on what filesystem you are using for /home. If you are using ext2/3 or reiserfs you can use the extresize or the resize_reiser program to shrink your /home filesystem. I believe that the Gentoo boot disk has those proggies, but I'm not certain. You can read up more on how to specifically use extresize or resize_reiser by reading their man pages.

Now the tricky part, from what I understand, is that you would then have to use fdisk to resize the partition device such as /dev/hda7 (which I'm guessing your /home partition is if /, swap, and /home are on an extended partion) to a smaller size so that you could make a new partion for Gentoo.

If you are using xfs for /home, then you are out of luck with regard to resizeing since xfs partions can only be expanded, and not shrunk.

[gabor]

i don't understand

"to resize the partition device".......

my harddisk looks like:
| /mnt/windows | swap | / | /home |

and i want it to look like:

| /mnt/windows | swap | / | / | /home |

adn then , somehow at boot time to choose which operating system (windows,mandrake,gentoo) to run.....

so if extresize i can make it smaller, then i can create the second '/' partition in the empty space and everything is ok. or not?

[gabor]

after reading your poste one more time....


there's a difference between resizing the partition and resizing the filesystem?

[yokem55]

Yes, that's what the ext2resize man page says. The etx2/3/reiserfs filesystem data structures have to be resized to fit within a smaller space on your hard disk, and then you can resize the physical partition on your disk to be smaller by using fdisk to delete that partition's entry in the partion table, and then recreating it with exactly the same starting point, but with a smaller ending point, leaving unpartitioned space for you to fill. To make a partion larger, you do things in the oppisite order; you first remake the physical partion larger, and then you expand the filesystem data structures.