Hi everyone! I have just recently have gotten Mandrake 9.1 and I just wanted to know if it was possible to have this: I have a regular 18 gb hard drive on fat32 and right now I have 8.5 gb free. Is it possible to leave about half of that space to windows, and the other half to mandrake? I couldn't make a partition that was that small in size. Perhaps I missed something?

Thanks a bunch!

You can certainly re-size the partition to whatever you like. Inside Windows you can use Partition magic which works quite nicely in resizing a currently in use partition to whatever you like while still keeping your current data intact. Linux also has programs for this as well, the one I have heard the most on is FIPS, though I have never actually used the program myself.

After resizing the partition, one should remain as your first partition with your windows installation on it as /dev/hda1 (meaning the first partition on your first drive) and the partition /dev/hda2 will be your freespace left over from the resize in which you can install Mandrake on.

MDK 9.1 has the most robost paritioning tool ever included in a Linux distro. It resizes NTFS safely. But I would still back up my files though.

Just boot the CD and go to custom paritioning.