Resizing a partition but what is this unallocated?

[Nish]

I have a fine working install of 2009 that I don't want to mess with but want to try out the beta.  I have a new mobo with limited IDE  and could only afford one SATA disk so both Windows XP and Linux are on the same disk - my burner and DVD drive take up the IDE.  Not an ideal situation but that is the way it is for now. When I can afford a sata burner I will free up an IDE and put one of my dozen drives on it for linux.

This is what I see from fdisk:

Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x43d343d3

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1       25496   204796588+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2           25497       60800   283579380    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5           25497       31870    51199123+   b  W95 FAT32
/dev/sda6           31871       32890     8193118+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7           32891       60800   224187043+  83  Linux

My initial idea was to carve out some of the windows disk - sda1 but know I will have to fix grub and fstab because of the new numbering of the drives and moving ntfs frightens me.  So then I thought I could take a little itty bit from the linux partition  -sda7 at the end.  No need to mess with grub and fstab then.  But I saw something worrisome in gparted...there is a little bit unallocated at the end of the disk - 7.84MiB - see here http://www.nishtya.com/unallocated.png.  Did I screw up something on my initial partitioning? (used the mfr utility to set up the partitions).  Should I just start fresh and repartition with an extra for test linux and reinstall everything?  Linux doesn't take me long but you know windows is a nightmare

[cyrwyn]

Is it truly unallocated space or a WinXP recovery (hidden) partition, although it seems very small? It would be at the end of the drive. If you can shrink your Linux partition, that would be the way to go. Just back up data in case. 

[Nish]

Well, this is a home-built with XP Home and to be honest, I am so jaded by the Windows installs I just accept the defaults, reboot, reboot, reboot, feed it more driver disks, rinse repeat. I didn't set up any type of recovery partition. And I partitioned with the disk of hard drive mfr, think this is a seagate.  Maybe something for its diagnostics?How to tell?

I could still shrink the linux partition without messing with whatever it is. Backing up everything now to an external.  But just didn't want to go through the windows install misery again if there was anyway to avoid it!

[menotu]

You may of considered this already, but would it be an option for you to install PCLos (2009.2 and 2010 if so desired) and then use VirtualBox to run your WinXP OS

And on both my  320Gb Sata drives I have 7MB of unallocated space but have never checked out what is as its never caused any problems (let sleeping dogs etc etc)

[Nish]

Well as far as the unallocated, yeah I will just leave it alone.  It is tiny, it is at the end.  Perchance, those drives you have the little bit on, are they seagates and were they formatted with their utility?

Now, I went ahead and resized a windows partition, but decided to split the FAT32 share partition rather than mess with the winxp os partition.  Now the strangest thing, I expected everything after to reorder and that I would need to at least fix grub and fstab but...

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Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x43d343d3

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1       25496   204796588+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2           25497       60800   283579380    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5           25497       28046    20482843+   b  W95 FAT32
/dev/sda6           31871       32890     8193118+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7           32891       60800   224187043+  83  Linux
/dev/sda8           28047       31870    30716248+  83  Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order
I don't get it, why is it named sda8?  it should have taken over sda6 and reordered everything after, no?  Is it safe to put the beta on?  This will only be a testing/playground kind of partition and never will have anything valuable on it but I just want to know how did I manage this trick?