>
> 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
>

My suggestion would be to install grub on a floppy. If you have Knoppix (or
another live cd distro) you should be able to boot into that, mount your RH8
partition, copy your grub.conf (and other necessary files) to a floppy and
install grub to the boot sector of the floppy. That should enable you to
boot into XP with grub.

There's a good 2-part article in Linux Magazine on grub that details how to
do this. It's available on-line at:
http://www.linux-mag.com/depts/guru.html

Bart

> 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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