Resizing main OS partition (bigger)

[dude_56013]

Alright. So, since I've gotten my new Samsung Spinpoint 1TB drive, I've been movie things like movies and games and large programs over to it to free up my bulging-at-the-seams 750GB OS drive (with 4 current partitions). Anywho, I've freed up an entire partition and want to delete it and extend my Vista partition. Here's the shakedown:

Partition 0 - XP (100GB)
Partition 1 - Vista (150GB)
Partition 2 - One that needs to be deleted (250GB)
Partition 3 - Important documents and music (198GB) <- All backed up on 2 diff. drives, btw.

So, what I'm wondering is, if I boot into a linux live CD (probably Ubuntu...much easier than the Fedora I have), can I delete Partition 2 and extend my Vista partition to fill that space? What are the chances of corrupting my Vista partition? And, should I defrag before I attempt this?

Also, I'm just assuming I need to boot into linux (or another OS on a separate drive)...I need to do this, right?

 

[J03]

I did something similar yesterday. I had had two NTFS Patitions. One with XP on, one with my files on. I wanted to install Ubuntu over XP, so I resized the XP partition down to 80GB, and increased the Files parition. Then, I formatted the old XP partition to the EXT3 filesystem.

I didnt loose anything from my files partition... But it took a while to resize (About 3-4 hours?)

 

[dude_56013]

I did something similar yesterday. I had had two NTFS Patitions. One with XP on, one with my files on. I wanted to install Ubuntu over XP, so I resized the XP partition down to 80GB, and increased the Files parition. Then, I formatted the old XP partition to the EXT3 filesystem.

I didnt loose anything from my files partition... But it took a while to resize (About 3-4 hours?)

Which partition was first? Cuz I'm assuming if you increase the size of a partition by going "backwards" into the previous partition (the xp one that you resized", if probably had to move the files from your second partition (with your files on it) "backwards"; whereas, I'm thinking that the way I'm doing it, it will just "flag" the partition increase so that it can write over where the files in the deleted partition were. Ya know? So if that's the case, yours was more "complicated" than what I'm trying to do, so I'm not too worried about it now. And I have a back up of everything important to 2 drives so I'm not concerned if something happens.

Did you just use linux live cd to resize? I'm assuming you did since you said you formatted into the ext3 format... (or did you do this at the prompts when installing linux?)