Newbie Questions

[Dan]

Tim Alberts wrote:
[snip]

>If you have only one hard drive and it has only one partition (which windows always does), get a second hard drive or partition the drive.  Partitioning a drive usually results in the data on the drive being lost.  I've heard you can repartition without loosing data, but I never tried it.
>
I've repartitioned two normal hard drives and two hard drives in a 
NVRAID 0 array through dmraid, using parted, ntfsresize, and dd for 
backup. Knoppix comes with ntfsresize enabled for qtparted, which makes 
it a very easy-to-use GUI for shrinking NTFS drives; fat32 should be no 
problem to shrink with parted / partition magic / whatever else. I've 
only lost data on one of the NTFS partitions I resized, fortunately it 
wasn't my main OS but my 64-bit windows install (ironically the only OS 
i didn't have backed up); it just went bonkers so i reinstalled that 
partition. I now have a backup of that partition also. However, it is 
true that other than a simple shrink of one partition to make 
unpartitioned space, repartitioning should really be left alone until 
you know what you're doing AND have somewhere to backup your important 
stuff.

[snip]
-Dan