Hi,

I had RH8 installed on a 60 gig drive and I recently acquired Mandrake 10.0
and Xandros 2.0 so I wanted to resize my partitions to make room for the two
new distros. I had originally allowed RH8 to occupy the entire drive; since
I didn't really use it as my primary OS (I'm still learning Linux so I
mostly rely on an XP install on a separate 10 gig drive) I never worried
about screwing it up to the point of reformat.

I was going to just fdisk and set my new partitions up then, but I heard
about parted so I thought it would be better to learn a new program and get
what I wanted done, non-destructively. However, things didn't work out the
way I thought they would and I can't boot into RH8 anymore. I'm not too
concerned about that, but when I fdisk/reformat I'm concerned that my
bootloader might get erased and that I might have problems booting into my
XP install that I rely on for everything right now. I'm not sure where my
bootloader resides (yet), but when I printed the partition table in parted
it showed a boot partition on my linux drive. One of the problems I had with
parted is that when I printed said partition table it only showed 3
partitions on the 60 gig drive. A boot partion about 100 megs large, a
primary ext3 partition about 58 gigs large and a linux-swap partition about
350 megs large.

I tried to resize the primary ext3 to 20 gigs in size and then move the swap
file to the area just after that, thinking that I could then utilize the
remaining free space, but got a bunch of error codes and now I can't boot
into RH. I was surprised that the print command in parted only showed the
three primary partitions as I know I set up more partitions than that when I
installed RH. I read the man pages for parted and also went into the doc
directory and looked at info -f parted.info per the instructions in the
README, but couldn't find a way to show a more detailed partition table.

I guess what I'm looking for here is any advice on how I can preserve my
current bootloader (GRUB) while reformating my 60 gig drive so that I have
three 20 gig partitions to install these three distros on. I hope that when
I reinstall everything I can just rebuild my bootloader to include the new
distros and the XP install on the other drive, but since I'm new to this I
wanted to solicit comments or pitfalls I might avoid. Also, if anyone has
any thoughts on the parted program I'd like to hear them as I didn't have
much luck with it (didn't seem very comprehensive, but it was probably just
my lack of skill in using it).

I'm thinking that when I stick the Mandrake or Xandros install disks in
they'll show me a more detailed partition table and then I'll be able to
erase everything except the boot partition and then go from there. It's too
late tonight to start an install so I'll just post this and read through
comments tomorrow night before doing anything.

Thanks a million and have a great night.

Steven

ps- sorry for the long-winded post!
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