Ok, my next project is to migrate my work laptop over to a dual boot system. It has a windows vista installation on a 500gb hard drive. (It was originally a 320 gb hard drive, and I made a mirror image of that to a 500gb hard drive, changed it out, so that I would have extra room.) Here is the setup that the Yast analysis suggested while I am installing SUSE linux from the installation disk. You can see that the extra 167gb is used entirely for Linux: /dev/sda 465.76 GB TOSHIBA-MK5065GS 0 60800 /dev/sda1 39.06 GB HPFS/NTFS NTFS /windows/C 0 5099 /dev/sda2 259.03 GB HPFS/NTFS NTFS kep /windows/D 5099 38912 /dev/sda3 167.67 GB Extended 38913 68000 /dev/sda5 2.01 GB Linux swap swap swap 38913 39176 /dev/sda6 20.00 GB Linux native Ext4 / 39176 41786 /dev/sda7 145.65 GB Linux native Ext4 /home 41787 60800 (by the way, I had to type this in by hand, as I can't copy and paste here during the installation) My original thought was that I wanted to shrink the windows D volume "kep" down to 70 GB and start the Linux swap at that point on the system, so that my /home directory would be bigger by about 200GB. So I tried to "move" the extended partition using the expert partitioner (I am still in the install program), and it would not let me, saying that the drive had already been created. (this probably happened when the power went out in the middle of the first install, and I am having to reinstall now, but I don't know for sure). So my question is, if I shrink the windows D volume to 70 GB (I only have 55 gb of data on it), will I be able to format those sectors later and mount it as another partition, like /sda4, and use it to store more data? The expert partitioner will not let me do anything with the empty space at this point in the installation, but here is what the table looks like: /dev/sda 465.76 GB TOSHIBA-MK5065GS 0 60800 /dev/sda1 39.06 GB HPFS/NTFS NTFS /windows/C 0 5099 /dev/sda2 70.00 GB HPFS/NTFS NTFS kep /windows/D 5099 14236 /dev/sda3 167.67 GB Extended 38913 68000 /dev/sda5 2.01 GB Linux swap swap swap 38913 39176 /dev/sda6 20.00 GB Linux native Ext4 / 39176 41786 /dev/sda7 145.65 GB Linux native Ext4 /home 41787 60800 So you see, sectors 14237 (are they called sectors or something else?) through 383912 are unused and unformatted if I shrink the volume. Would it be better to just go on and keep it as NTFS? The only way that would help me out is that I could store files on that drive that would be usable to both windows and linux. However, the only thing I am really planning to use windows for is updating my ipod, and a particular work program I have that won't run under anything besides windows. What are the disadvantages to keeping it as NTFS? Does linux access the files more slowly if they are in NTFS format? Thanks in advance for your help, George -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org