WINDOWS TOOLS: GPARTED
( Sizing an NTFS Partition )


Julia ( aka teacher ) sent us the following Tip:

If you have an NTFS partition that is being a little troublesome, you might need a program designed to boot from disk that allows you total control over your hard drive to resize or partition your NTFS and other partitions.

One tool for partitioning a NTFS partition before installing your program is the Gnu Parted Project Gparted is a small 36 MB ISO-imaged program that you can simply click to download and then burn it with one of the two packages in the tip: WINDOWS TOOLS: BURNING ISOs
The first thing you need to do after burning your CD is put it in your CD-ROM drive and make sure your BIOS is set to allow you to boot for CD.

When it boots up it will come up to the first screen. Simply press enter to “boot” the computer from the disk. Next you will get a series of screens where it asks for your monitor parameters. You can simply press enter at each screen if you don't know your settings. Most computers are set up for a monitor resolution of 1024x768 as well as a setting of 16 or 24 million colors.

Now you will come to a screen with a menu at the top and a graphic showing your hard drive. It might look a little daunting but it really is not. It looks like this:

<--click to enlarge

There are two ways to select your drive and partition it. First click on “Edit” and then “Resize” at the top of your screen.

<--click to enlarge


The first method is to click on the image of your drive and grab either end of a drive you want to resize by dragging it to the size you want. The second method is to go down below and change the numbers in each of the selection boxes. The “Free Space Preceding” box will move your partition to the right. Set your size in the new size box. The “Free Space Following” box will allow you to set how much space there is after your drive. Keep in mind that as you change the size in one of the boxes it will change the others.

One you have finished then you select the type of partition and the File System. You can set it as ext3 if you are looking at any of the distros. Some distros can be set as Reiser but some do not handle that well. If you are partitioning it for Windows you most likely will want FAT32 to make it easy to ready from Linux. If it is for a Windows 95 or earlier, then select FAT16.

Once you are done you need to select “Edit” and then “Apply” at the top of your screen.

When you close this out you will have a blank screen with a button at the very bottom right corner that looks like a power button. Click on the button to reboot your computer. Don't forget to remove your disk as your computer starts back up or you will find yourself going right back into Gparted.

Have fun preparing your drive for Linux.



Bruno




-- Mar 27 2006 --