Thanks Gparted and thanks Puppy

Using Gparted - Puppy Linux
Partitioning is one of those activities which one needs to perform very carefully.

Especially if you have limited disk space,managing space between different OSes is art.

When I had bought my PC.,I had just installed Windows XP on it.XP was fine.

But I am fond of trying new things.I had learnt about Ubuntu and wanted to give it a try.

Hence i got a Ubuntu CD ordered from their site and installed it after creating a 3 GB partition for Linux,carving it out from one of the FAT32 partitions.

Later my XP ran into problems.It was affected by virus and I had to reinstall XP.While doing so I had to reformat the NTFS partition.

When I booted the PC after installing XP,the GRUB screen which would prompt to choose between Ubuntu and XP disappeared and I did not know how to get it back.

I am no expert and so I Googled for the answer.But could not get a solution which was simple enough to implement.

Thus the PC now booted directly into XP and the Linux partition was practically unusable as I could not log into it.

As the files on my PC started to increase in size,I started feeling he crunch.I wanted the 3 GB space allocated to UBUNTU back.

At the same time I also wanted to have a Linux OS which would allow me to safely exchange data(I have posted an article on how to safely exchange data with Puppy Linux).

Puppy Linux was the answer.I did not have the need to install it on the hard disk.It booted from the RAM.

For reclaiming the space allocated to UBUNTU(UBUNTU does not play multimedia out of the box..it plays OGG files,but most of the media is mp3,mp4,avi not playable out of the box in Ubuntu),I decided to delete the ext3 partition and convert it into a FAT32(Windows) partition.

Puppy linux came to the rescue again.

I used the Gparted tool in Puupy linux and deleted the 3 GB ext3 partition.using the same tool I could convert it into a Windows partition.

Thus,I now had an extra 3 GB partition and one which Windows XP could read.I dedicated this entire space to my photos.

Every GB is important at this point as I have just a total of 80 GB of space.Even if I had more,space management is always important.

For doing so,good tools are always handy.And Gparted proved to be one good tool.

Thanks Puppy for providing another important tool.

I just can't stop loving Puppy.It is such a wonderful thing :) Bow wow !!