partitioning

[Avi Greenbury]

papaben25 at comcast.net wrote:
> I am new to ubuntu and would like to know if I can use GNOME partition 
> editor to repartition my hard drive so I can put another OS on it. I 
> have an 80 gig drive that is set up /dev/sda1 ext3 /(mountpoint) 76.62 
> gig,   /dev/sda2 extended 2.89 gig,   /dev/sda5 linux-swap 2.89 gig. the 
> question is. Can I repartition without loosing anything?
> 

In general, yes, though it's always a good idea to back up anything 
important in case something goes wrong.

You don't provide any details of the free space in any of the 
partitions, but the general method of repartitioning in order to create 
more space for an additional OS is to shrink one (or more) partitions 
and use the resulting space.
You'll likely want to keep swap that size (and it can be used as a swap 
partition by the other OS if it supports Linux Swap), and I'd imagine 
sda5 is probably a bit small to have much usable free space, so chances 
are you'll be shrinking sda1. But by how much depends on how much free 
space you have, how much you want, and how much space the additional OS 
takes.

It's also worth bearing in mind that *some* additional OSs will clobber 
your bootloader and configuration, so you may find yourself unable to 
boot to ubuntu afterwards. You can use the Ubuntu Live install CD to 
reinstall grub to fix this, though. It's a good idea to have one on hand 
just in case.


-- 
Avi Greenbury
http://aviswebsite.co.uk ;)
http://aviswebsite.co.uk/asking-questions