Formatting Hard Drive Question

[ghosstt]

OK, so I recently reformatted, and realized that I didn't leave any space un-formatted, so I could make a separate partition for random crap. (I ended up formatted all of the hard drive to NTFS, on 1 partition) Is there any way I can take some of that space, and make it a separate partition, that is unformatted, so I could say, install another OS on it?

[hackmodford]

Try using GParted... it's included in the Linux Mint Live Distribution so you could do it with that and if you wanted to install another OS you could try mint... personally I like Ubuntu better but I like where Mint is going with most codecs included...

[joeyjoe9876]

try using the Gparted boot disc so you don't have to install ubuntu or linux lol

[ghosstt]

Well, I'm probably going to end up installing ubuntu or something anyways, to try out linux, but Ubuntu doesn't have anything like that preinstalled. I'll try out Gparted I guess

[ghosstt]

OK, Gparted did exactly what I needed it not to do. It did the same thing that windows data manager lets you do, create partitions from unformatted space on the hard drive. (Which I have around 8mb for some reason) I need to partition an already formatted section of my hard drive, without reformatting my whole hard drive.

[Dr. Killjoy]

If you can get ahold of a copy of PartitionMagic, that'll be what you're looking for. I used it for just that purpose a couple years back.

[Sparkfist]

GParted allows you to reformat a specific partition. I know you can do this, I've used the GParted live-CD for that exact task. Try selecting the specific partition, I don't know if you missed it or didn't know you can do that. Then just select the format you want it to be and you can then start.

Also if you did mess up and have one whole partition when you want two or more, GParted can take empty space in a partition and use that to make a new one. Be forewarned that doing so does carry the risk of losing the data you have on the partition you're splitting, so do a back up if you have anything you need to save.

-Sparkfist

[hackmodford]

Or if you made one partition too big you can resize it and then create a new partition in the empty space.