• Partitioning Your Hard Drive

Partitioning Your Hard Drive

MEPIS includes a CD partitioning program, QTParted, that works similar to Partition Magic from Windows. If you will be resizing a Windows partition to make room for MEPIS, you must first run Windows and defrag the Windows partition and run chkdsk on it. If you do not do this, the resize may fail.

You can start QTParted either by choosing from the KStart menu System::Filesystem::QTParted or by clicking the Run QTParted... button under step 1b. of the MEPIS installation wizard. QTParted will ask for the root password. If you are running from CD, the root password is root.

Click on the disk (1) you want to partition. MEPIS will gather information about your disk and display it on the right. Some Windows installations have only one partition. If you have one Windows partition, click on it in the right hand list. If you have more than one Windows partition and less than four, click on the biggest one with the most free space (2). This is usually hda1. Click the partition button (3).

A new window Resize partition (1) will open. You may click and drag the green partition rectangle (2) or type a new size in the text box below it (3) to resize the partition. Try to allow at least 3GB for MEPIS, more is better. Click the OK (4) button. The Resize window will disappear. Now, click the disk icon (5) in the main window to commit your changes. QTParted will warn you that you can lose data. This is why you make sure to back up before you partition. Click Yes. A progress window will appear. Click OK when it says the process is finished.

In QParted's window, click on the free space you've just created then click the Create (1) button. The Create partition (2) window will appear. You can leave that Create as and Partition Type alone. Enter the Label root (3) and a Size of about 50% of the total space available but at least 2GB (4) and click the OK (5) button.

Click on the free space in the main window. Click Create. Choose Extended Partition from the Create as (3) menu. Click OK (4). This allows you to add a number of additional partitions.

Now, click the free space under the extended partition you just created. Click the Create button. Type the Label swap and make the size at least 128 MB, but preferably 512MB. Click OK. Click on the free space in the main window again. Click Create. Enter the Label home and the size will be whatever's left over. Click OK. Now click the disk icon (6) to commit your changes and click OK when the process is finished. Control-Q will quit QTParted. You're done!

If you have three Windows partitions, then create the extended space before you create the first Linux partition.