QtParted question

hello

!!!first of all, back up your important data bevor doing anything with qtparted!!!

i would guess this partion table means the following:

01 is a boot partition, something created from dell
02 is your win xp home
03 should be a restore partition from dell, i don't know exactly what it contains, but you should could delete it
04 in not used disk space

so you can delete 3 and 4 an that should be enough to install mepis.
you can read your data from your windows partition but you can't write data to this partition since it is ntfs formated and mepis can't write to it.

if you like to use the windows partition within mepis you can reinstall your windows and let it format the win partion with fat32. thats one format that windows an mepis can read/write.

if your planing to switch too linux than this would be one easy way, cause you have to seperate OS on your pc but you can share the data within both OS.

hope i could help ya

greetz, ruben

I don't think it's a good idea to delete the Dell Recovery partition, I think that contains all your programs that come by default on your computer and you can use it to reinstall WIndows.

Before using QTParted back up important data and defragment the disk (it's essential that you defrag the disk before you use QTParted).

With QTParted resize the NTFS partition. Save the changes and create the needed partition in the free space created this way. You need a "/" (root) partition and a swap partitions. Optionally you can have a separate "/home" partition

OK. So I resized the ntfs and it now looks like this.

Now what do I do to make my linux root and swap partitions? When I right click on the 03 partition the only option I see is Property.

Thanks,

-Jerome

Try to restart QTParted or even reboot from the LiveCD you should be able to create partition.

You have to create first an extended partition that uses the whole free space and then inside that 2 logical partitions. That is necessarily because you cannot have more than 4 primary partitions.

The 2 virtual partitions should be one for swap and one for root, swap size around 512MB should be enough.

I've rebooted and run qtparted. I right click on the new free partition and the only option is Property. How should I turn this into an "extended partition"?

-Jerome

I'm not sure why you don't get the "create" partition option. I've seen some problems with QTParted, people had problems with it. Hopefully somebody else has other suggestions

(maybe if you delete the Dell recovery partition it might work, but again... I don't know if that's such a good idea if you want to keep Windows)

Removing the DellRestore partition worked.?? Thanks for your suggestions.