Help me, I'm chicken

[ixalarx]

Today I resolved to install linux on my WinXP computer, so I put in the knoppix disk and open up qtparted (using knoppix 3.7 with qtparted 0.4.4). After doing a resize on my Windows partition but before clickng "commit" and ACTUALLY resizing it, I saw the bar for my windows partition turned all red and said used space was "N/A." At this point I was totally horrified and hit undo. I've defragmented and verified there's no data on the tail end of my drive where I'd be putting the partition. However, I'm horrified about losing data. Will I lose any? Also, there are 2 partitions on my drive, so I'll have to make an extended partition to put linux on. How do I do this with qtparted? Thanks in advance.

[ixalarx]

Anybody? Help, plese?

[Harry Kuhman]

Wow, you waited 59 minutes before posting again! My advice is to not worry about it. After all, anything hat you really care about you have backed up on CD, DVD or other removable media. The stuff you don't have backed up you clearly don't care about. So no problem.

[CrashedAgain]

You have 2 partitions already? I assume you mean a C and a D drive in win terms. So you should already have an extended partition, your windows should be on C (hda1 to linux) so you should be able to add another partition without affecting hda1 as it will go in the extended partition.
QTparted should make the partition without any data loss but back up first just to be safe.

[ixalarx]

Sorry about the short time between the two posts, I was kind of agitated at the time. At this point, I've acquired Partition Magic 8 and have made a 2 GB swap and 13 GB ext3 partitions, and plan to make 3 GB of the 13 GB one a root partition (this is done during the install, right?) thanks a lot for the help.

EDIT: And the other partition is a restore partition that came with the computer, in case you were wondering.

[Kram]

It does show a C drive and a D drive, but the D drive is a partition designated as a restore partition for windoze XP. I don't think it would be a good idea to mess with that partition. Another partition would have to be made up by reducing the NTFS partition, and creating a new Fat32 partition.
I am also curious as I do not want to mess up a new puter while I explore Linux as a Debian install. Or any distro install for that matter, as they all handle differently. I too would like to create a 10 gig area to learn Linux
On my old puter ( now dead mobo ) I did a HDD install on a spare HDD. I built that machine myself, and I had a very minimal licenced 98SE disc for it ( minimal content-full licence ), but I have never re-partitioned a drive with a working and valuable OS on it.

[CrashedAgain]

Sorry about the short time between the two posts, I was kind of agitated at the time. At this point, I've acquired Partition Magic 8 and have made a 2 GB swap and 13 GB ext3 partitions, and plan to make 3 GB of the 13 GB one a root partition (this is done during the install, right?) thanks a lot for the help.

EDIT: And the other partition is a restore partition that came with the computer, in case you were wondering.

You really don't need 2 G swap, 2G is almost enough for a whole install!. 3-500 Meg is LOTS, especially if you have a decent amount of normal memory.
The knoppix operating system should have about 4-5Gig, about 50% of this will actually be used. You CAN run with as little as 2.3 Gig but you have to purge out unused apps as soon as you install & be very careful about cleaning up & not wasting space.
I would set up a substantial amount of space for a vfat data partition & move all data to it (including data now on windows C) Both XP & Linux can read/write to a vfat drive so they can share the data drive and you NEVER want to have data on the same partition as your operating system, Windows, Linux or any other. Operating systems sometimes crash & all that irreplaceable data is history if you have a bad crash.