1) backup hda3 and hda6 to cd, or to hda1 or hda2. If you dont have room to backup everything, you will need to reinstall the OS on hda3 so be sure to at least backup what is important to you.

2) hd5 is swap - hd4 is an extended partition (container for hda5 and hda6) - both can be entirely deleted without worries at this point.

3) hda3 is your linux partition - if you successfully backed this drive up in step #1 you can delete the entire partition.

4) hda6 is your win95 drive - if you successfully backed up this drive up in step #1 you can delete the entire partition.

At this point you should have hda1 & hda2 - the rest of your drive is free unpartitioned space.

5) create hda3 as your swap to whatever size you originally had hda5.

6) create hda4 as your ext3 linux drive using up the rest of the drive space.

7) restore your hda3 backup to hda4 or reinstall your OS then restore backup depending on what you did in step #1.

8) restore your hda6 backup to where ever you will need that (hda1 or hda2 since its a windows drive).

And that should be it. No lost data (if you made good backups). No partition resizing (which has high chances for data loss/corruption). And no fuss.

I messed up.. You cannot delete hda4 until hda5 AND hda6 are deleted first.... So switch Step #2 and #4 around.

What you want is the Logical Volume Manager. That way you could blow away hda6, recreate, create volume/group, and expand into the newly available partition. I know almost nothing about it, but got some really great advice though this forum. whatshisname is a Fedora guru, but I suspect LVM will work just as well on Debian.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=318669
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/do.../LVM-HOWTO.html

I looked into LVM, but that seems like too much of a hassle. So noone here reccomends resizing hda3? I cant' back up to hda2, becuase there's not enough room(Assuming that the backup will be the same size as the amount of HD space used). I'd backup to hda1, but it's NTFS(thus readonly). How much compression is there(using w/e backup method, preferably the most compressed).

Does anybody know?

Yes you can do this.
But without a special tool to move the raw data on the disk you can't move the start of a partition without copying the data to some other place.
Parted and other linux tools can resize most partitions and filesystems without corrupting data, but few of them can resize extended partitions unless they are unused.
Resizing the extended partition are actually easier since it doesn't contain any raw data.
The simplest way is to first free up some space to grow/shrink the extended partition then fire up "fdisk".
First write down the current partition table, especially the start and end of logical partitions. During the next few steps you should be in fdisk, and make sure that you don't use "w" (write) until you are done. "D"elete the extended partition(hda4). (This also removed all partitions within)
Create a new extended partition covering those logical partitions you wanted to keep, check the figures you wrote earlier. Recreate the logical partitions you wanted to keep exactly with the same size and location they had before. You might try the "v"erify command to see if fdisk thinks your new partition table makes sense. When you've checked everything you press "w" to write the new partition table to disk.
Then you can use parted or some other tool to resize the other partitions now that you have fixed the size of the extended partition. Don't forget to edit /etc/fstab if your partitions have changed number.
Some filesystems have special tools to resize partitions/filesystems: Ext2resize, xfs_growfs, resize2fs etc.
Parted can handle ext2/3 + reiserfs but not xfs.

The way you describe it makes it sound like I would need to delete my current install, and overwrite it with an extended partition. Is this what is supposed to happen(as that would delete my data)?

is the above correct?

You would have to ask less, if you read better....

I beg your pardon? Judging from what lpd said, It shouldn't erase my data? I'd need to format the things I want to get rid of(hda5hda6) right?

If a disk is formatted, all data is lost...
Prior doing this, one should back-up his data..
Get rid of all small partitions, by trhowing them away..
The unallocated space can be repartioned and formatted to the fs one requires..

Reread your post, look at the pages suggested, and there will not be a problem, unless bad luck, or doing things not as told.

ok, I'll have to figure out what I need to do to completely back up my system(so as not to have to reinstall). Is there a Tar usage for this? Thanks.

you have windows installed - <edit>Go find a trial edition of Norton Ghost, or go buy it.</edit> You can then backup entire partitions (will backup and restore partitions tables & structure), or just files of a partition (will note restore partition tables) to cd/dvd/network/hdd. I prefer the cd/dvd backups because to restore, you just boot from cd/dvd and it does it all for you. Simple.

I've not seen anything like this for linux yet. You can find ghost <edit>in any comp store that sales software, or maybe even the norton website.</edit>

*edited to remove recommendations of retrieving pirated software. hehe - sorry.

The question is: Do you you have such important things which are unreplaceble?

Most of the time is backing up y're mail, passwords, and bookmarks enough.

Every programm used is available...

Maybe there is some music, or movies you want to keep..

Most of the time everything is somewhere located around your /home.
So backing up /home would be sufficient...

And if not, you'll know by missing something, what you should save next time....

Personaly, i moved that much, that i have one dir, which moves with me all the time, and even there, i have regularly get rid of junk...like one big suitcase, containing the real important stuff.
Like drivers, and executional files you need right in the beginning...personal Documents,mail, passwords and bookmarks...

It's mostly my mail and fluxbox settings that I want saved. I guess I could reinstall, it's just a hassle