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I am a newbie and have just made a mistake installing Linux with a very small partition.

Is there any way to resize the partition without any footprint and overhead?

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Use a liveCD with Parted, like the SysRescCD or just Parted Magic with the PXE, USB options if you don't like burning discs. You can use that to resize most Linux and Unix type partitions. But I would stick to using Vista or XP's partition tool to resize the actual Windows partition.

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To be honest, I've never been in this situation, but I figured that somebody should try to answer this. Because you haven't given much information about your setup, i'm assuming that your vista partition is right before your linux partition, which either goes to the end of the disk, or a recovery partition.

On my laptop, I dual-boot vista and fedora. I keep a 40-GB partition for fedora, and leave the rest for vista. Now, 40 gigs is quite enough for a linux install, and even a fair amount of personal data, so I've never messed with it.

From my understanding of partitions, they are somewhat touchy with regards to where they start, less so for where they end. Howevver, this is a working knowledge of partitions and may have absolutely no relation to the truth. I know that you can grow and shrink a partition by moving where it ends....I don't know if you can move where it starts around without fubar'ing the partition/disk.

If you don't mind re-installing the linux OS, I would use the Vista partitioning tool to shrink the vista partition, scrap the linux partition, and reformat. If you copy your home directory , your /etc directory, and reinstall using the same software (in terms of version numbers, etc), that should result in more room for linux and little to no reconfiguration.

You could try shrinking the windows directory (using the vista partition manager), then grow the linux partition using parted or something, but as I mentioned before, this may not be possible/safe given that it would involve moving the start position of the partition. I could certainly see it causing much confusion for linux afterwards.

If your concern is merely having enough room for your personal files, I would highly recommend mounting your vista partition in linux, and creating a symlink to the mount point in your home directory (Actually, I would highly recommend doing this anyway). This way, when you boot back into windows, you don't lose whatever you were working on in linux, and vice versa. If this is something you'd like to do, I could help you with it, but I would need more information about your partition setup.

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  • Thanks. :-) I will see if there is any other good answer. If none, I will set it as an answer.
    – GabrielC
    Jun 27, 2009 at 4:41
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Gparted Live CD - resized my Vista partition (with boot manager installed on it) 2 days ago. Work like a charm

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