HD Install :: How to shrink Windows on old systems?

I have a number of old Pentium I computers running Windows 95 and 98 to which I want to add DSL by a hard disk install.

Windows typically takes up the entire disk as a single partition, so as my first step, I need to shrink that partition to make space to add a Linux partition.

I can shrink the Windows partition with Gparted or similar GUI parition tools, but I can't run a Live-CD Linux offering this tool in the 16 to 64 M available on these machines. I don't believe that FDISK or CFDISK (available in DSL) support the shrinking of partitions.

Does anyone know a tool I can use to shrink the Windows partition?

The only way I can think to accomplish this is to (1) remove the disk drive (2) attach it to a larger machine (3) run Knoppix or other Linux off Live-CD and run Gparted to shrink the Windows partition and add a Linux partition (4) re-attach the drive to the original machine. Yuck... too much work!

Thank you for any better advice.

I think there's a "parted" extension available in mydsl.

There's also commericial tools that may work.

I managed to do this in similar circumstances using ntfsprogs - see here for an explanation. I posted an ntfsprogs extension.

Maybe your Win95/98 partitions are not ntfs, but you could convert them to ntfs then try the above?

parted works fine for fat16/32..

original here.