I need to put another Hard drive(solved)

[Old-Polack]

Quote
Xenaflux, I have used Gpart with livecd, no in Pclinux and I had problems, lost W7 and I have to reinstall it.

That's why I use EaseUS from Win7

Yes, I have heard about it. Something to do with ' so-called ' un-movable files , put there by the win7 installation at the end of a drive  (( some bug report on the www )).

How can I give space of dev/sda7 to dev/sda2 Huh?

You obviously can't as the HD is full.

Why exactly do you ask  ?  Anything I said  ?

Seriously, you didn't really say that. 

There are 669 unused GB on the sda7 partition. It can be shrunk by whatever amount desmolinux wants to add to the sda2 partition, then it and all partitions in between can be moved towards the end of the drive, including shrinking the extended partition so the empty space is immediately after and adjacent to the sda2 partition, at which point sda2 can be expanded into that empty space.

[Xenaflux]

OP

SH##
I must be totally out of my mind.
The only excuse for this is that I only read the sentence half

I never 'saw//registered' the "  to dev/sda2  "

OK, accept my apologies for the blunder of the day
Note: it was 07.30 local time in the morning after a bad night sleep.
I don't know what to say else   

[dvhenry]

How can I give space of dev/sda7 to dev/sda2 Huh?

You can do this, one procedure looks like this (basically).
Run Gparted fron a liveCD
Move/resize sda7 (/home) to the right.
Move sda6 (swap) to the right.
Move sda5 (/) to the right.
Resize sda3 (extended) to give the free space.
Resize sda2 (windows).

Although, if you are not confident with Gparted, or don't have everything you want to keep backed up (you should, partitioning errors are only one way to loose data), I would not recommend it. Even though it would mean no changes needed to bootloaders.

An alternative that minimizes risk is
Run Gparted fron a liveCD
Shrink sda7 (/home) to the left by the total amount needed for windows.
resize sda3 (extended) leaving free space at the end of the disk.
use the partition copv/paste function in Gparted to copy sda2 (windows) to the free space created.(which will become sda4)
resize sda4 to use the remaining space.
Reinstall the windows boot loader,.
Once you are satisfied with the sda4 windows install, remove the entry in the windows bootloader for sda2.
reformat sda2 to use as a data partition.
Edit or reinstall GRUB.  

[Old-Polack]

OP

SH##
I must be totally out of my mind.
The only excuse for this is that I only read the sentence half

I never 'saw//registered' the "  to dev/sda2  "

OK, accept my apologies for the blunder of the day
Note: it was 07.30 local time in the morning after a bad night sleep.
I don't know what to say else   

If you remember, you're the one that showed me how to do the shrinking and moving with Gparted when I said I'd never used it before. I literally had to do I double take on that line to be sure I was seeing it correctly. 

It may be your "blunder of the day," but it made mine, with the laugh I got out of it.

[Xenaflux]

It may be your "blunder of the day," but it made mine, with the laugh I got out of it.

Thanks, I start feeling better already   

[desmolinux]

Thank you for your answers but I'm not confident about using Gparted, that's why my original question was about installing a second hard drive, and if it is as simple as formatting it in windows and I won't need to do anything at all in PCLinux. And, installing a second hard drive will affect the Grub in any way?
Thanks.

[Old-Polack]

Thank you for your answers but I'm not confident about using Gparted, that's why my original question was about installing a second hard drive, and if it is as simple as formatting it in windows and I won't need to do anything at all in PCLinux. And, installing a second hard drive will affect the Grub in any way?
Thanks.

If you install Windows to the new hard drive, with the other hard drive disconnected, It will just be a normal Windows installation. If you then reconnect the first drive, and make sure it is seen as the boot drive in BIOS, all you need to do is add a Windows stanza to your /boot/grub/menu.lst as follows.

title Windows
    rootnoverify (hd1,0)
    map (hd1) (hd0)
    map (hd0) (hd1)
    makeactive
    chainloader +1

This assumes Windows to be on the first partition of the second drive, which is the norm for a user installation. Should your First drive fail, disconnecting it will allow the Windows installation on the second drive to boot normally, as it still retains its own boot code on that drives MBR.

[Xenaflux]

......but I'm not confident about using Gparted, that's why my original question was about installing a second hard drive,......

If you are going to buy a second hard drive, then this is the opportunity of a lifetime to get some practice with Gparted.

Since you have nothing on the HD, and thus nothing to loose, why don't you decide to spend a few days just playing around with Gparted on your new HD

You can do no harm, as you always can revert to his original state, and here and now, you can gain a lot of experience at no extra cost

[dvhenry]

......but I'm not confident about using Gparted, that's why my original question was about installing a second hard drive,......

If you are going to buy a second hard drive, then this is the opportunity of a lifetime to get some practice with Gparted.

Since you have nothing on the HD, and thus nothing to loose, why don't you decide to spend a few days just playing around with Gparted on your new HD

You can do no harm, as you always can revert to his original state, and here and now, you can gain a lot of experience at no extra cost

Yes, but for those who don't have the luxury of a clean new hard disk to play with, a virtual hard disk and Virtualbox is another way to learn a lot with Gparted, and to simulate the changes you want to make without any risk. There are limitations however, For example, with the way I have my virtual hard disk set up, although I can install multiple Linux systems on this virtual hard disk, I can't install a windows on it.

This brings me to a question that some here who use windows may be able to answer. Can windows "Disk Management" in vista and/or win7
handle shrinking and/or growing the windows partition? The reason I ask is that if either can do either of these ,then getting windows to do that part of the job would remove the main concern shown in this thread over the use of Gparted. I have read that it can (at least shrink), It would be nice to see that confirmed one way or the other.

[Xenaflux]

I have read that it can, It would be nice to see that confirmed one way or the other.

Not only have I read it can, I also have read many posts where was mentioned it works, and it works very well.
The only time that it doesn't seem to work, is (( and I quote what I read, not what I experienced )) when for some reason windows 7 has installed unmovable files towards the end of the partition. In this case, a partition manager, EaseUS ,  mentioned above, and another one which I forgot the name of , seemed to do the job perfectly well.
I do not remember ever reading a bad comment on this particular issue...bu...be carefull with this statement...I don't do a lot of reading about Microsoft products 

[Old-Polack]

This brings me to a question that some here who use windows may be able to answer. Can windows "Disk Management" in vista and/or win7 handle shrinking and/or growing the windows partition? The reason I ask is that if it can, getting windows to do that part of the job would remove the main concern shown in this thread over the use of Gparted. I have read that it can, It would be nice to see that confirmed one way or the other.

Since the arrival of Vista, that has been the recommended method of shrinking a Windows partition. In most cases growing a Windows partition is not a concern, as Windows installers are source hogs that normally use all of the available space on the hard drive as the so called C:\ drive.

[dvhenry]

This brings me to a question that some here who use windows may be able to answer. Can windows "Disk Management" in vista and/or win7 handle shrinking and/or growing the windows partition? The reason I ask is that if it can, getting windows to do that part of the job would remove the main concern shown in this thread over the use of Gparted. I have read that it can, It would be nice to see that confirmed one way or the other.

Since the arrival of Vista, that has been the recommended method of shrinking a Windows partition. In most cases growing a Windows partition is not a concern, as Windows installers are source hogs that normally use all of the available space on the hard drive as the so called C:\ drive.

Thanks, question answered!!

[dvhenry]

Not only have I read it can, I also have read many posts where was mentioned it works, and it works very well.
The only time that it doesn't seem to work, is (( and I quote what I read, not what I experienced )) when for some reason windows 7 has installed unmovable files towards the end of the partition. In this case, a partition manager, EaseUS ,  mentioned above, and another one which I forgot the name of , seemed to do the job perfectly well.
I do not remember ever reading a bad comment on this particular issue...bu...be carefull with this statement...I don't do a lot of reading about Microsoft products  Cheesy

I also have had no problem with using Gparted with win98. winXP and vista, it seems that win7 and in some cases vista can have issues, It's useful to be aware of these.

[dvhenry]

it seems that win7 and in some cases vista can have issues,

From what I can tell, It seems the main Gparted NTFS resize issues on these OSs' were fixed some time ago, please inform me if I am wrong. Thanks.

[Xenaflux]

From what I can tell, It seems the main Gparted NTFS resize issues on these OSs' were fixed some time ago, please inform me if I am wrong. Thanks

Well, to find out, one will have to go to the Gparted site and browse through the change logs of the latest releases.