Need a Tool (to avoid becoming one...;)

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OK. Here's the situation

Current OS - Windows 2000, 1 single partition on C, 1 single on 2nd HD (D)

Adding this -

Fedora 11 - DVD.

Now, I've gone through backing up almost everything, and freed up about 30 Gig of space. Did a disk defragment, to 'sort of' shove most of the files to the front.

Here's what I need to do -

Do a 'non-destrictive partition' on Drive C (Evidently Fedora wants non-partitioned space to work with, and there isn't). According to the installation notes (all 200+pps of them..., 'your software' should be able to

A) Compress
B) Partition the unused space
C) Red hat says to delete the partition to free up the space for Fedora.

Now - is there an Open Source program that will do this? RH says that Boot Magic and System Commander are problems if used. (I don't think they're free, either...

If not, I have to go 'destructive', which will ruin my day...

Now, if I can only get a USB DVD drive to do the boot (got the ISO program y'all recommended to work great...thanks to everyone for that), I'm ready to join Club Linux...

hm, start diskutil, select the drive, press the + button, drag to desired size, done.

if you have a 2nd disk, why not use that?

'cos it's completely formatted as well. I didn't plan to put Linux on until recently.

Diskutil? Is that part of the Fedora install? or a separate program? If so, just let me know where I can find it.

diskutil is fer osx

i think there's a freeware one, but can't remember the name

What I normally do is use an Ubuntu livecd to resize my partitions before installing Fedora. (They'll mail you a free one if you want) Boot up into the live environment, choose "Partition editor" from the Administration menu, and it should be relatively intuitive from there. After that, Fedora will do its thing with the free space. Best to follow its suggestions or it might refuse to install.

Alternately, there's a gparted livecd out there somewhere that would basically be the same thing, but smaller/lighter if you don't want to download all of Ubuntu. It wouldn't boot on my machine though, so I can't vouch for it.

There is a gparted liveCD. it can do some nice tricks.

hmm...well, actually, now that I've done all that cleaning, drive space isn't a problem...

Don't have OSX on my system (it's Windows 2000), so I'll look at Ubuntu and see what happens. I've got almost every bit of data onto the new machine, so I could just start fresh if I have to, I just want a backup OS in case the Linux load goes pear-shaped (I seem to remember Orwell reporting problems getting it loaded).

thanks. Will report back later if I run into problems.

Fedora 11 has a tool like gparted and worked for me called Palimpsest Disk utility (under system tools). However it would be really easy to get gparted on the live CD, all it should take it a "yum install gparted" command. Hope that helps.

supanuka is right. You can install stuff onto a liveCD. It will inhabit the ram and will not persist when you shut down.