Partitions?

[ShadowHarlequin]

Hi, i installed F7 with a generous (considering the space i had) amount of HD space for its various partitions, but i ran out of space for windows

i had to shrink down the "/" partition by 4gig but i cant merge it with my primary one because all of the linux partitions are on the "extended" drive

any help? its a little confusing and i havent tried booting into F7 yet after resizing that

thanks

[bob]

A number of things. If you haven't already installed Windows, you'd be better off doing that first and then installing Fedora afterwards. Personally, and that's only my opinion, but other than setting up a swap that's roughly equal to double my ram and not more than a gig total, I let the rest of the install go into the root "/" partition rather than splitting everything into compartments that may prove too large or too small.

So, for those who may be able to give you their excellent advice (and prove me wrong), how about giving us some specs about how big your drive is, what partitions you have now and what other OS's might be installed on it? Keep in mind too, that a 40 gig drive is actually a bit smaller than 40 gig in the 'real' world, so plan accordingly.

[ShadowHarlequin]

ok thanks

its 120gb hard drive
partition 1: 4.8gig - Acer recovery data (i think) [NTFS]
partition 2: 83gig - Windows XP [NTFS]
partition 3: 102mb - Linux Boot (/boot) [Linux Etx 3]
Partition 4: Extended 23.8gig

1: "/" - 9.8gig [linux etx 3]
2: free - 4.9gig
3: "/home" - 4.4gig [linux ext 3]
4: unformated - 3.4gig
5: free - 1.3gig (linux swap?)

id like to add that free 4.9gig to the windows partition, and also is it possible to reconfigure F7 to store user data on "/" instead of "/home" so i can merge those?

thanks

//all of the italicised ones are under the extended Partition 4

[bob]

First things first - back up your data if you haven't already, because you're probably going to be repartitioning the drive.

Well, you've got enough space for Fedora - nearly 20 gig total even with giving back 5 gig to Windows. Your /home is too small and you have a bunch of 'free' and 'unformatted' that's doing nothing. You could simply use gparted live or whatever partitioner you want and merge partitions 3 and 4, then just do a default install on the 20 gig. partition 3. That would set Fedora up as LVM. In your case you really don't have enough set aside to run more than one distro at a time, so LVM's not going to be an issue.

As you mention, you actually want to grab another 5 gig for Windows, so might as well do that with the new partitioning scheme. You'd first resize NTFS to add the 5 gig, then simply leave the rest as free space. During the install, point Fedora to the free space and have it do a routine install on it. Don't bother to set up separate partitions this time around. See if you're comfortable with Fedora and get a feel for how much of a /home you really want or need. Next time, perhaps you'll set up a separate /home but I wouldn't bother now, you can always just back up your data to DVD's or CD's for a fresh install.