Hi. I want to install Linux on to a new partition. Unfortunatley I am having problems with creating a new partition. I have 3 hard drives and due to ignorance they have only ever had 1 partition each: 1 Internal 40Gb NFTS - nearly full 2 External 160Gb FAT 32- 70Gb free 3 External 160Gb FAT 32 - 24Gb free I want to create the new partition on drive 2. Say 25Gb. However (I think) due to the fact it has been nearly full there are no spare allocations. In fact going to my Computer Management, Storage, Disk Manager... it seems that the only partition I can create is 16Mb on disk 1 !!! Would a disk defragment sort out the files so that there are spare partitions for me to allocate? What is a logical partition - I'm not sure how to create one anyway but would it help? Please help, Thanks David McKechan
Here's my suggestion. Take the 160GB drive out of the external inclosure and put it in your system as the secondary drive...no worries, most of them are IDE drives and are the exact same as internal drives..just put in an enclosure. Then, move all the data from the second partition on that drive to the first partition of that drive. Change the FAT32 format to NTFS, using the command from RUN (start, run, cmd) In the DOS window, type: Convert X: /fs:ntfs where X is your secondary drive's first partition letter. You could then remove the second partition (24Gb) from the drive using the Computer Management tool, but the Linux installation disk should be able to do that for you. It's best to let Linux partition and format on it's own.
Hi thanks for your reply. I may take your advice about making the HD internal. At the moment I only have one partition on each drive and I'm wandering how I can go about creating a 2nd partition where there is plenty of space but it has alrady been allocated as partition 1 due (in my opinion) to the drive being near full before. Is this possible? Would the Linux installation take care of this? Thanks again, Dave
