Swarup,

Keep coming with the good words and I might just be able to persudae the Justlinux Admin to upgrade my company bicycle to a company Ferrari, even I haven't seen my company bicycle yet!

I am just a pupil here starting as an absolute beginner a few years back. Wait until you see my teachers and the village olders here. The big guns are among the members and the super moderators here. I am helping others in exactly the way I was helped. I just pray they are not disappointed me as a byproduct of the Justlinux forum.

The answer to your question should be yes but I have not done a full example recently.

You can shrink a partition on either to the left or to the right or even on both ends but you need to know the following

(1) It is best to do one shrink at a time.

(2) It is essential that you never shrink the partition that is providing the operating in use. Think about it and you will understand. No one will be please to return home to find it half the size. There is something to do with the integrity of the OS too. No decent OS would permit itself to be shrunk "while" operating. In other word use Linux A to shrink Linux B.

(3) Linux boot loaders, both Grub and Lilo, work by refering to the hard disk address of the partition, the form of which cylinder, head and sector. Once a partition has been shrunk the original hard disk address is void and so either Grub or Lilo will need to be restored. The Just Booting Tips Section B has all the details to do such restores.

(4) If you shrink a logical partition sda5 you only shrink its boundary inside the extended partition envelope sda2. The original extended partition envelope sda2 is not changed at all and so the vacant space will not be availbe to primary partition sda1 outside. To allow the outside primary partition sda1 to access the free space you need to shrink the extended partition as the second step.

Once the extended partition sda2 is shunk to remove the empty space the vacant area will be availble outside to permit the primary partition sda1 to expand its right hand side.

(5) Although it is slower I would recommend to do one step at a time and only resize Xp in sda1 after satisfying all your sda5 and sda6 are working normally.

Linux is nice to work with because you can know everything you are doing. In the majority of the cases you can even reason it out.