Tim Alberts wrote:
[snip]
If you have only one hard drive and it has only one partition (which windows always does), get a second hard drive or partition the drive. Partitioning a drive usually results in the data on the drive being lost. I've heard you can repartition without loosing data, but I never tried it.
I've repartitioned two normal hard drives and two hard drives in a
NVRAID 0 array through dmraid, using parted, ntfsresize, and dd for
backup. Knoppix comes with ntfsresize enabled for qtparted, which makes
it a very easy-to-use GUI for shrinking NTFS drives; fat32 should be no
problem to shrink with parted / partition magic / whatever else. I've
only lost data on one of the NTFS partitions I resized, fortunately it
wasn't my main OS but my 64-bit windows install (ironically the only OS
i didn't have backed up); it just went bonkers so i reinstalled that
partition. I now have a backup of that partition also. However, it is
true that other than a simple shrink of one partition to make
unpartitioned space, repartitioning should really be left alone until
you know what you're doing AND have somewhere to backup your important
stuff.
[snip]
-Dan
