Partitioning Problem

[cire]

My primary DOS partition is under my extended DOS partition, which is stopping me from installing linux alongside windows. Is there anyway to fix this without buying a program suck as partition magic? Thanks.

[plague-iv]

I'm affraid I'm not very well informed on re-aranging partitions although if theres a tool that will do it it'll be GNU Parted. It will let you add, remove, resize and check partitions. You could also see if one of the fdisk variants will allow re-sizing but I don't think any of them do

Pated is at
www.gnu.org/software/parted

[voodoo4chaos]

There is two free progs i can think of.

1. FDISK - should come on the win98 bootdisk or CD
2. Ranish Partition manager - available from www.downloads.com

Try them both - then you problem should be sorted

[rcgreen]

If you don't mind reinstalling windows,
the easiest thing to do is pop in your linux
install CD and go from there.
During the install process, you get a chance
to make all new partitions as you see fit.
Create one FAT partition for DOS/WINDOWS
and the rest for LINUX. If you need lots
of partitions (for a real sophisticated system),
you can make an extended partition with
"logical" partitions in it. More extended
partitions can even be nested within
extended partitions...
You only really need your FAT part. for windows,
a linux swap part. and one linux native part.
Windows is happier if it is on the first
primary partition, but things can get
hairy without a good book on dual booting