adding partitions to free space on hd?

[chunkstyle]

hey

can any of you please tell me how to go about adding additional partitions to my c: hd without screwing up the existing contents?

the drive is a western dig, 111gb capacity with about 99gb free, and i've been told that it's a good idea to partition it into smaller chunks for faster scandisks & defrags. i'd also like to add linux (suse 9.0) as a 2nd os. if the existing 111gb is now formatted in the ntfs file system, for win xp, can additional partitions be formatted in different systems (not sure what file system lunux uses), or would the whole drive have to be wiped clean & have zeros written to it?

can fdisk do this when the hd's already got stuff on it? and (really stupid question here) is fdisk resident on my computer as a default part of windows? i assume probably so, as i was able to run msconfig recently from the "start" menu's "run"
prompt, and fdisk is, as far as i know, a similar basic-level application.

thank you!

[RJ]

Resizing existing partitions can only be done with third party tools like Partition Magic.
The Windows XP utility can't do that. And FDISK is something you can completely forget. Being a program for DOS and DOS-based Win9x, it doesn't even support NTFS. It is not a resident program and it is not included in WinXP anyway. You will only find it on Win9x CDs or Win9x startup disks. And even FDISK wasn't able to resize existing partitions.

But once you resized the partition you can create new partitions and format them with the file system you want.

RJ

[DragonNOA1]

As far as resizing an existing partition goes, add my vote to getting Partition Magic. I have it and it works wonders. It is very easy to use.