Linux Linux Partitions

Ok I decided that I was going to install Fedora 64-bit edition onto my HP laptop. I have used the laptop as a windows only machine for about 6 months now. SO there is lots of stuff on there I don't want to lose or have to rebuild. The comp's hard drive came with a single partition and windows pre-installed. I tried to use partition Magic V.8 to re partition the drive without data loss. When the machine attempted to resize and re-arrange the drives it started and then gave up due to too many errors. I attempted several times and several file systems including NTSF none of them worked. Any sugestions on how to get that partition set up?

 

Quite a lot of Linux installers nowadays come with partitioners that support resizing (Ubuntu, Debian, etc.), however, you're never safe with these (trust me), so I'd recommend backing up and giving it a go anyway, or not bothering at all.
Either way, there's some chance that you'll loose your stuff.

 

As ramble says resizing partitions is somewhat dodgy, i suggest you backup to another computer then format

 

Allways back up important data when you mess with filesystems and partiton tables

 

Just as a side note, you may have already done this, but if you are going to resize a partition, it is probably worth doing a defrag on it first, to make sure all the data is at the front of the drive, then the new partition can be stuffed on the end, without overwriting any existing data.

As others have said this is a very dodgy operation, so make sure you have a good backup first, it's worked for me before, and it has also completely hosed a Windows partition for me before. YMMV

 

So it does a virus/spyware scan too, and removes all the bad software while doing it J/K

 

if you didn't allready make sure before you try partition magic or any other that the hard drive is as defrag'd as possable.. when i resize my lappy one i run defrag a good 3-5 times

 

I knew that whe doing partitions was a little risky. I backed everything up to an external hard drive. If I lose anything I can rebuild it from that. I had defragged the drive once thinking that would be enough. I will re-run the defrag and try again. thanks. Is there any thing else that could create the error of too many errors. when partition magic attempts to apply the changes I made.

 

there is a live-cd called gparted (30mb)
gparted.sf.net
it is a very good tool for editing partition, and a little safer than in windows (the resized file system is not mouted and inactive, it help sometime. But i recommand to defragment before too, the operation dont have so much risk, but it is always safer to do backup and defragmentation

 

I looked into the gparted software and it seemed like it had to run inside of an OS. Linux to be precise. the issue I am having is getting my HD partitioned without losing my windows data so the dual boot is available. can Gparted be run from a boot CD and not lose the windows data?

 

it is a live-cd (if you downlaod the live version of cource)
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/gparted/gparted-livecd-0.2.5-3.iso.zip?download