Repartitioning Utilities

BACKUP YOUR DATA!!!!

The Law of Repartitioning - The probability of repartition failure is directly proportional to the importance of the data on the drive being repartitioned.

FIPS 2.0
  DOS utility that can resize FAT16 and FAT32 filesystems without destroying data. fips DOS boot disk
GNU Parted
  The GNU partitioning tool - it can resize, copy, and check FAT16, FAT32, and ext2, as well as detect a few other types. You can download a Linux bootdisk with the latest version of parted here.
Partition Magic
  An excellent commercial partitioning tool from Power Quest. It can resize / manage FAT, NTFS, ext2, and other partition types.

Creating Boot Disks from Disk Images

In Linux

Use the following command:

dd if=yourbootdisk.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k

As always, consult the man page for more information. dd is a very useful and versatile utility.

In Windows and DOS

In Windows, use rawwritewin.exe. In DOS, use rawwrite.exe, like this:

rawwrite yourbootdisk.img

Links

Rick Moen's FAQ - includes a more complete discussion of repartitioning.
The NTFS Problem For Linux Installers - excellent discussion of how to deal with NTFS.

Summary

Did I mention that you should BACKUP YOUR DATA before repartitioning? No?
Well, you should.



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