Repartitioning without Mac OS install CDs

[carl]

Hi, here's a question for all you experts to discuss ...

The background - I have a 2001 iBook, 10Gb HD, CD/DVD Drive with Mac OS X and OS 9 installed on it. I would like to install YellowDog linux on the system, more out of curiousity that anything. To do this, I need to repartition the drive to give Linux it's own partition. I have access to a CD burner on a PC, connected to by laptop via a LAN.

The problems - There are a couple of these. I have everything updated and upgraded to latest versions (10.1.4 and 9.2.2, with all the other software updates applied for instance), everything's set up really nicely, and ideally I don't want to download and setup everything up again. It wouldn't be the end of the world if I had to, though.

The big show stopper is this: My laptop is here with me in England (Where I am for the foreseeable future) and my install OS CDs are over in Ireland (Where I usually live).

So, I either need to repartition on the fly, not losing data (Like what partition magic can do on Windows) or some clever way, backup my data, repartition and re-install it WITHOUT my install OS CDs.

I have seen the post about various methods of cloning and backing up, but I can't find any information on whether I'll be able to restore from the backup when I'm in Linux (Presuming, since I have the Linux CD, I'll have no problems installing it so I at least can do some things to the system!)

I'm pretty experienced with UNIX, but I'm new to the Mac - I don't full understand these resource fork things, and even the partition schemes seem to be different to what I'm used to.

Any pointers at all on this would be gratefully received, and just before someone says it, yes, I know it would be easier to get the CDs sent over! But being a geek, I'm at least interested to see if this is possible!

Regards,
Carl.

[Phil St. Romain]

Beats me! I'm not the geek guru out here, however, that's for sure. If there's a way to partition without those CD's, I've never heard of it.

Can't you install Yellow Dog on one of your existing partitions? Does it really require its own partition? I know that's ideal, but if it's not required and all you want to do is check it out, why not install it on your OS 9 partition?

[Craig R. Arko]

No, Linux requires its own partition since it uses a different filesystem and structure.

You might be able to modify the partition map with pdisk (http://www.cfcl.com/eryk/linux/pdisk/), but I wouldn't even think about it without a decent backup.

[carl]

The problem with that is that I one have one, big partition - Should have mentioned that really - If I had a dedicated OS 9 partition, that would have gone a long time ago, since I have no use for it any longer.

I know that I certainly can't share the partition with Mac OS X since a lot of directories are the same (/usr, /etc, /dev for instance), so unfortunately, it looks like I'm snookered - it's looking more likely that I'm going to have to get the CDs sent over!

Regards,
Carl.