How to make room for an additional distro

[Pongo Pan]

On Fri, 2012-09-14 at 00:23 +0100, Avi Greenbury wrote:
> Pongo Pan wrote:
> > 
> > Install gparted, the Gnome partitioner, and shrink the primary partition
> > you have now (may take a long time: run this overnight) and then add an
> > extended partition in which you can make as many logical partitions for
> > more distros as you like.
> 
> This will not work; you cannot resize the partitions on a disk that is
> in use, so you cannot resize the partitions on a disk containing the
> operating system you are using.

You're right, of course.  I've so seldom had a machine with only one
partition on it that it didn't occur to me that you can't resize from
within a partition.  
> 
> You could boot off a live CD (such as Parted Magic), but it seems a
> bit of a convoluted process - boot off a live CD to resize partitions,
> then boot off a different live CD to install the system - when the
> Mint install CD will be able to perform both tasks.

I still prefer to use a specialist live CD for partitioning: you get all
the additional utilities like disk cloning, hardware checking, etc. in a
nice environment and a full-fledged gparted is easier to use and simpler
to understand than the cut-down version that comes with ubiquity and its
clones.
> 
> -- 
> Avi
> 

-- 
pongo pan
Thu, 13 Sep 2012 18:06:09 -0700
Epicurus up 24 min, 2 users, load average: 0.23, 0.16, 0.22
Linux 3.2.0-30-generic
Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS, gnome-session 3.2.1, unity 5.14.0