Partitioning Safely?

["Mitchell Verter" <mitchell.verter.toronto@gmail.com>]

Thanks for all the dual boot advice.

Now I need to partition the disk and move the Linux partition to the second partition

I am looking at the Linux Partition HOWTO (
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition/) and the parted manual (http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/manual/parted.html#Introduction)  I should run this off of a Knoppix CD, right?

I bought the laptop with Debian installed, so I know little about it.  I don't think there is much data on it and I probably don't care about keeping old data, just preserving important system files, programs, executables, etc.  

Is there a good way to find out where on the disk the data is written, so that you can be sure that your intended partition is empty of anything important?  Is there a way to consolidate data to one area of the disk?


Thanks,
Mitch