Reducung partition during installation of OS.

On Friday 13 April 2012 10:57, Kay Man conveyed the following to
alt.os.linux...

My desktop computer currently accommodates Win XP SP3 and Ubuntu 11.10
(dual boot arrangement). I am using Ubuntu much more frequent as
initially anticipated, in fact I only access Windows to keep the OS
and its application therein updated.

Since my wife has opted installing Ubuntu 11.10 64-bit to her
notebook, I am very inclined replacing Ubuntu 11.10 with a different
Linux operating system.

During the initial Ubuntu installation process I chose to "Install
Ubuntu alongside Windows XP", and let Ubuntu determine its own size(s)
of partition(s).

My total HDD capacity is 74.53 GB and is partitioned as follows:
Windows: 46.76 GB
Ubuntu: 25.77 GB plus 2.00 GB

I would like to reduce the size of partition for windows considerably
to about 15 GB or less thus having more space for the Linux operating
system.

To do so, is it possible using any Linux OS Live DVD overwriting
Ubuntu and, during the installation process, manually manipulating the
the partition sizes for the respective OSs (i.e. Win minimum space &
Linux maximum space)?

Yes, that is possible, but you don't even need to reinstall Ubuntu,
assuming that you've installed it in a single partition - i.e. a rootfs
only and an additional swap partition.

It is possible to non-destructively resize a Windows partition using
gparted or a similar tool, but before you do that you must first boot up
Windows in "safe mode" and run a full defragmentation on it. Then, when
that is done, you can boot up in Ubuntu and resize the Windows
partition, and you can then use the free space for an additional
partition. But this could get tricky on account of partition ordering.

The least troublesome way however would be to follow all the steps to
reize the Windows partition - i.e. defragment Windows first from within
its "safe mode" - and then reinstall Ubuntu (or another GNU/Linux
distribution), hereby first deleting the existing Ubuntu partitions and
recreating them from the available free space.

Another option would be to wipe the whole hard disk and install Ubuntu
(or another GNU/Linux distribution) on the whole system, and then
install Windows inside a virtual machine with VirtualBox - provided that
your machine has enough RAM of course - for those rare occasions where
you still need to use Windows.

Lastly, if you only need specific Windows applications, then you might
even be able to get them to work with Wine, which is a Windows-
compatible ABI on top of UNIX systems. That way you don't even need to
have Windows installed anywhere. However, it does need to be mentioned
that the Free version of Wine that ships with most GNU/Linux
distributions does not support all Windows applications. It could
however work for a few simple applications, depending on what you need.

= Aragorn (registered GNU/Linux user #223157)