OK, just in case it's of interest to others, this is what I came up
with now.

To recap, the aim is to have:
* a dual-boot XP / SL laptop
* with a Win32 partition that's accessible from both,
* relatively easy to resize the main OS partitions to different user
  requirements...

One hazard, a I showed before, was that Partition Magic did not seem
to care for a partition table that's been set up by Disk Druid.

The new partition layout that I came up with was this:

/dev/hda1 XP HPFS/NTFS partition
     hda2 Win32 partition accessible from either OS
     hda3 Extended partition
      hda5 SL "root" partition "/"
      hda6 and hda7, "/boot" and swap partitions in either order

GRUB on the MBR seems quite happy to deal with this (LBA addressing
is available).  Maybe a bit unconventional, but seems to meet the
requirements.

The idea then is that if the user disk requirements change, then
the XP partition can be grown at the expense of the Win32 partition,
or the SL "root" partition "/" can be grown at the expense of the
Win32 partition, without being forced to change anything else
(partition magic seems happy to adjust the "Extended" partition
to suit).

When installing SL, at Troy's excellent suggestion, when we reach the
point at which Disk Druid would be called, we go ALT/CTRL/F2 and
invoke fdisk to set up the partitions.

Then we switch back to the graphical install, telling the installer
to use the existing partitions, and use the [Edit] button on each
of the relevant partitions to assign its mount point, and tell the
installer to format it (ext3 or swap as the case may be).

In this way we get a partition table that doesn't offend Partition
Magic, whereas (as previously noted) once Disk Druid had been used to
assign partitions, PM was declaring the partition table to be
irreparably corrupt (typically, error #114).

Apropos PM versions:

PM7.01 is (contrary to some suggestions made) quite happy to
resize XP partitions.  It isn't willing to resize ext3 partitions,
but it otherwise doesn't object to them being present.

Apparently PM8.0 is the current version and it *could* resize ext3
partitions (I don't have a copy within reach).  (But there are other
tools for resizing ext3 partitions, for sure).

[Once, in a tight corner, I managed to resize an ext3 partition with
a version of Partition Magic, by using tune2fs to downgrade the file
system (-O ^has_journal) to ext2, resized that, then used tune2fs to
upgrade it again.  Not ideal, but it worked for me.]

Is there a limit to how high the /boot partition could go?  (assuming
GRUB and LBA, let's say).  These laptop disks have a mere 25-ish GB
available (30GB minus IBM's product recovery area).

all the best


On Tue, 5 Oct 2004, Troy Dawson wrote:

> Thanks for the report Alan,