Disk Druid or Partition Magic?

He has: 286 posts

Joined: Mar 2003

I would like to install Red Hat 9 on my PC, to dual-boot with Windows XP.

The hard drive has about 40GB of free space for the Red Hat installation, but I need to partition that space for Linux (ext2 format, I believe).

Partition Magic can shrink the current Windows partition and then create the Linux partition. I was hoping that Disk Druid would do this, because it comes with RH9, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't.

I'd prefer not buying Partition Magic and/or another hard drive. Is there a version of Disk Druid, or some other Open Source program that can shrink partitions?

karmaman's picture

He has: 82 posts

Joined: Nov 2003

Hi I just use a version of fdisk from an old boot disk it works fine,you can download a copy from http://www.23cc.com/free-fdisk/
hope this helps.

Greg K's picture

He has: 2,145 posts

Joined: Nov 2003

I did a search on google for "free partition resize" and this is one of the sites that came up:

http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilities/partitioneditors.shtml

seems to have links to some free programs that can resize your partitions.

-Greg

mairving's picture

They have: 2,256 posts

Joined: Feb 2001

Well I wouldn't go with RH9 as it is basically dead. You will need to go to Fedora or Mandrake or one of the others. Disk druid should be able to resize your partition for you. It seems like from past experience it kind of does it for you automatically. You can't really use Fdisk. It will create the partitions but will will also destroy the old one, i.e. as in lose all of your data. Partition Magic is a great tool but I think that it is dated. Ranish is probably the next best free one. What I would probably do is see if you can either find another small hard drive or buy one. A 40GB 7200 RPM HD costs under $50 which is probably cheaper and safer than buying PM.

Mark Irving
I have a mind like a steel trap; it is rusty and illegal in 47 states

He has: 286 posts

Joined: Mar 2003

Quote: A 40GB 7200 RPM HD costs under $50 which is probably cheaper and safer than buying PM.

I bought one of these from Newegg. I also puchased Acronis Disk Director to partition it, and some other drives I have.

Then I bought the Red Hat Fedora Bible which contained 4 Fedora 2 CDs. So far, it works OK, except for the dual boot. When I get some time, I'll figure that out, too. Disk Director has a way of setting it up.

They have: 23 posts

Joined: Dec 2004

Be careful with partitioning. It was like playing with matches in my case... Two days to get back to the previous state - because of broken partition program.

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