new partition on already partitioned drive
 

Ok. I have a 40gb hard drive, on which 13.4 GB is used by my current windows xp install and all my proggies. There is only one partition on this drive: the C partition. What I want to do it set aside 5gb of this partition into another (to install knoppix on). Is this even possible?

yes. when i needed to partition my drive with stuff already on it, i got partition magic. it is a helpful program, but you can also get yourself into trouble with it.

as long as you create the other partitions at the end of the drive, you should be ok. don't make the mistake of trying to move anything at the front of the disk, where the mbr / boot information is.

Just remember that with Partitiion Magic, Ntfs support is not as steady as one would believe. It can read and partition drives formated with the nt/xp file system, but has diffficulty on the whole issue of writing the formate for moving files.
Some Linux distros have a partition program as bart of the bootstrap (boot choice) that will carve a section out for the new OS and modify the boot order to offer a choice without affecting the MS boot program. This is often a safer choice since it requires no-one to actually modify the boot sector besides the OS install program.

yeah, 3rd party programs are the way to go here.

if this was before you had stuff on here, fdisk was the solution.

I've resized and moved many a NTFS partition with Partition Magic - no problems. Your mileage may vary.

PM is the 1. if ur on Win, it is the only choice, EZ 2 use and EZ 2 undo, just longjohns said STAY away from the Boot Partition..

PS: Takes an overnighter if ya' wanna do GB's on it though. Made the classic of settin' up two new partitions on a 20GB drive and expectin' to play my new game that day - haha....

so will my win xp still work if i do this?

You will shrink the current partition - C: is what I presume. This will give you a new, empty, 5 GB partition. XP will still be on C: just with less space.

Once you format the other partition XP will still work but it may be unsure what format the other partition is. XP won't assign it a drive letter if it's not FAT, FAT32, NTFS, or CDFS (any of its known formats).

The Microsoft documentation says you can't resize the boot partition. This only applies to their own disk tools, Disk Manager in this case. Resize away with Partition Magic.

I highly recommend you perform some sort of backup - at least of your documents. If this doesn't appeal to you, buy a second hard drive and use a removable drive bay. No fear of losing your data that way.

You could also try VMWare or similar virtual machine product but the second hard disk is cheaper and foolproof.

yeah, rubicon's got a good point - you could buy a second hard drive for what partition magic will cost you (assuming yr going legit). then you just format your new drive with the partitions you want, and have a place to backup your current C:\ drive, or to use for other things. and since you're not touching your existing drive, the risk is eliminated

erm...
*OF COURSE* i'm going legit.... ;-)
anyways, i already have partition magic, but i don't already have a new HDD. just wondering if p-magic would work for this. seems it would.

I am not the expert here, but, I don't think you need a partition/drive for knoppix. Go <a href="http://tfproject.org/tfp/search.php?s=&action=showresults&searchid=42277&sortby=lastpost&sortorder=descending">here</a> for TFP experts, or, just good info.

Partition Magic is a great way to manage your drives. Read Rubicon's stuff.

I had Red Hat 9.0 installed on a partition, and it succesfully tried to configure my notebook as if it belonged to "them". To get rid of it (red hat) stunk. Partition Magic made it easier.

Delete partition, resize partition, allocate space, and, a partridge in a pear tree.
Have a great day, hope this helped.

<i>Ok. I have a 40gb hard drive, on which 13.4 GB is used by my current windows xp install and all my proggies. There is only one partition on this drive: the C partition. What I want to do it set aside 5gb of this partition into another (to install knoppix on). Is this even possible?</i>

I am apologetic here. I didn't really read your initial post.

Bottom line is, you want to creat another partition. Right?

You could do fdisk, and lose everything. Or, once again, Partition <a href="http://www.powerquest.com/partitionmagic/">magic</a>. It is not too <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-form/002-6006594-9267239">expensive</a>.

Have fun, good luck. email me if there is a problem.

Since you are running XP, make sure you have Partition Magic 8. Previous versions will not support the version of NTFS that XP uses.

In a word: YES!

BUT... if you're unsure (and it seems you are), you should consider the second HDD.

Good luck!