On Wed, Mar 24, 2004 at 05:17:51PM -0600, Dan Abernathy wrote:
I have a dual-boot WinXP/Suse 9.0 system, and I need to take hdd space from the Windows side and give it to Linux.
There's some good information about dealing with NTFS when installing Linux at http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Filesystems/ntfs.html. There are links from there to multiple partition resizing/moving utilities. I recently needed to resize a fairly large (180GB) NTFS partition and was unable to do it with Partition Magic 5 (which reported that it didn't have enough memory; this machine had 1GB RAM). I ended up successfully using the trial version of BootIt Next Gen, as described in the document referenced above.
QTParted can probably do some of this,
IIRC, QTParted requires that your NTFS partition be defragmented, and in my case, the Windows 2000 deframentation utility did not do so satisfactorily (maybe related to large swap file that was not moved?).
but it doesn't look like [QTParted] can resize Ext2/Ext3 partitions.
It can. See http://qtparted.sourceforge.net/features.en.html.
I'm not sure if that's even what my Linux install is using, it could be ReiserFS - how can I find out?
This depends on whether your installer has created the filesystem yet or not. You should probably read the docs for your distribution. SuSE defaults to ReiserFS these days.
Worst case I can always pick up a copy of Partition Magic, install that under Windows, and do my resizing,
Before you go performing open-heart surgery on your filesystem under Windows (I shudder at the thought), borrow a Windows machine and have Partition Magic create rescue floppies for you. You can (at least back with version 5 you could) boot from these and have full PM functionality. I don't know why anyone would want to install Partition Magic under Windows. Nothing it does needs to be performed on a live filesystem. -- Phil Mocek