repartitioning question

[venkman]

If I have multiple partitions on a drive and I want to erase one partitition and split it into 2, will this affect the other partitions?

My situation is such:
I partitioned my non-techy friend's hard drive on his brand new pc into 4 partitions: 1 for windows xp, 1 for linux boot, 1 for linux swap, and 1 for linux root. He's gone ahead and installed windows, and I'll be installing linux (RH or Suse) soon enough. I've decided I'd like to give him a fat partition also (in addition to the existing ext2, ext3, ntfs, and swap filesystems/partitions). Can I repartition the partition containing the linux root into 2 partitions without ruining his existing windows install? I think when I originally did it I put the linux root as the only member of an extended partition (can't remember for sure though), and all the other partitions are primary partitions.

So can this be done?
-Venkman

 

[nwardez]

Hi Venkman,

Yes, you can safely delete the linux root partition and split it into 2 without detroying the xp's one. Nothing will be changed on partitions you don't touch. You will also need to create the new partitions in an extended one, as pc only supports 4 primary partitions per drive.