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Installing Linux 7
Resize your Windows partition??”If you have available space on your Windows partition,
you can shrink that partition so there is available free space on the disk to devote to
Linux. Commercial tools such as Partition Magic from Symantec (www.symantec.com)
or Acronis Disk Director (www.acronis.com) are available to resize your disk partitions
and set up a workable boot manager. Some Linux distributions (particularly bootable
Linuxes used as rescue CDs) include a tool called QTParted that is an open source clone
of Partition Magic (which includes software from the Linux-NTFS project for resizing
Windows NTFS partitions).
An alternative to QTParted is GParted, which is included on the media for this book.
Before you try to resize your Windows partition, you might need to defragment it. To defragment
your disk on some Windows systems, so that all of your used space is put in order on the disk,
open My Computer, right-click your hard disk icon (typically C:), select Properties, click Tools,
and select Defragment Now.
Defragmenting your disk can be a fairly long process. The result of defragmentation is that all the
data on your disk are contiguous, creating a lot of contiguous free space at the end of the partition.
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