defragmenting/resizing

[Bilal Ahmad <bahmad@cisco.com>]

I have bought recently a HP Pavilion ze5300 laptop w/ a 40G hard drive (38G 
actually), and with Windows XP Pro. I want to partition the hard drive so 
that I leave 18G for XP Pro and 20G for Debian. Windows Disk Defragmenter 
leaves a chunk of files right in the middle of the disk:


/////*****************_________________*****____________________________________



/// ---- System files
*** ---- Contiguous files
___ ---- Free space



I have tried Diskeeper as well (including at boot time), and couldn't get 
those files to move towards the beginning. In the notes somewhere it says 
that Diskeeper won't move files that are in the Windows exclusions lists, 
such as the space for hibernate mode.

Is there another way to get the those files to move towards the beginning 
without having to wipe out the whole disk first? Any help would be greatly 
appreciated. (PS: This will be my first attempt at installing a linux 
system. There is no floppy disk in this computer; It has a DVD-ROM/CD-RW, 
however.)

Thanks.
Bilal