[TriLUG] Laptop issue: resizing partition

[Andrew Perrin]

Greetings-

I've got a new (to me) Vaio laptop on which I want to dual-boot Win98 and
debian. I can boot to the debian install CD, but what I'd *like* to do is
resize the partition on the hard drive first so I can install debian
without having to reinstall windows.  Unfortunately, debian's boot cd
doesn't have parted on it, so I can't go that route.

I downloaded Acronis's "DiskEditor" as a free Windows disk partition
editor, but I'm a bit scared of it - there's no obvious way to simply
change the size of the partition. I can edit begin and end cylinder, head,
and sector, but I don't know the right way to calculate where these should
begin and end for a, say, 3GB partition.

Has anyone used this before, or can anyone suggest an alternative
direction to go to resize the partition? (gnu's parted boot disk doesn't
work because this thing has a USB floppy.)

Thanks.

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Andrew J Perrin - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
clists at perrin.socsci.unc.edu * andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu