Parted Not Found

[trev.saunders at gmail.com]

Hi,

> You are correct. I typed help after accessing parted, but the help is more
> of a reminder. An Admin must know how the arguments work correctly.
> 
> I cannot seem to find a good tutorial on how to use parted or fdisk. I would
> like to learn the switches and what the various commands mean such as
> commas, slashes, etc.

you don't need to give commands arguments, if you don't give them, parted or fdisk will ask the questions one at a time like the following example.

you type resize.
parted replies what partition would you like to resize you enter 1
parted asks you how big you want make partition 1 be, and you say 40G
parted resizes the partition, and asks what you'd like to do next.
This is a rough sketch, its been a month or so since I needed to partition a disk.  I remember them being fairly self explanatory so long as you let it ask the questions instead of supplying arguments, but if you want a explanation, the gentoo handbook at http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook.xml has a decent description of how to use fdisk in chapter 5.

> 
> My current problem is that I have an 80GB hard drive. I installed XP Pro SP3
> on it using a primary NTFS. Now, I want to resize that to make room for the
> ArchLinux installation. Resize seems my best bet, but it has so many
> arguments that must be entered correctly. I know I am diving too deep for a
> beginner, but I am only a beginner in Linux. I know the rest very well from
> administering Windows for the last 12 years.

Ok, I take it you didn't use the windows installer to set up partitions with a spare partition for linux?  Unfortunitely, that would have been slightly simpler, because ntfs support in linux isn't the simplest thing.

What I believe you'll have to do is use ntfsresize to resize the ntfs filesystem that windows uses, then use parted to shrink the partition that the ntfs filesystem was on, and make file system's on the new partitions for linux.

This will look something like the following:
1. #ntfsresize --size <new size>G /dev/sda1 # note that <new size>G is the number of gigabytes you want the file system to be, where a gigabyte is 10^9, not 2^30
I would probably use about 40G for windows, maby 50 or 60 depending on my exact needs, in that case you would do ntfsresize --size 40G /dev/sda1 if windows is on the first partition of the first harddrive.
then use parted to resize that partition to 40G, and create new partitions for linux.

HTH
Trev
> 
> Any good tutorials or articles would be great. Bare with me folks. I will
> catch up very quickly. Thank you.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: trev.saunders at gmail.com [mailto:trev.saunders at gmail.com] 
> Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 2010 7:12 AM
> To: Speakup is a screen review system for Linux.; JP Jamous
> Subject: Re: Parted Not Found
> 
> Hi,
> 
> yes, speakup is part of the kernel, but parted etc are just normal
> executables.
> wrt your original problem you seem to have been missing the space between
> the name of the program (parted) and the argument, (/dev/sda the drive you
> wanted to partition).
> 
> HTH
> Trev
>