Re: Partitioning a drive with Windows 7 already installed

[Mark <mamarcac@gmail.com>]

2010/10/12 Γιώργος Πάλλας <gpall@ccf.auth.gr>

For backing up the whole disk before starting with dangerous operations I suggest Clonezilla (the open-source equivalent of  Ghost). It use it regularly and hasn't betrayed me.
As for the rest procedures, I also suggest you resize the windows partition with gparted from a ubuntu live cd, and then run the debian installer.

This is the right way to go.  First use jkdefraggui to defrag & move all Windows 7 files to front of disk, from within Windows 7.  This helps avoid data corruption before editing partitions.  Then create backup image using Clonezilla.  Boot to gparted Live cd (or usb flash, I keep one handy at all times with gparted Live on it for just such purposes), resize partitions, including creating your ext3 and swap partitions for Debian, and all should be set for your computer to receive the Debian installation.

As a side note, if it came with a big hard drive, from my experience I suggest a 30-40 GB Windows 7 partition (yes it needs that much these days), 18 GB for Debian, 2 GB for swap, and the remainder as a "share" partition of either fat32 or ntfs (which is mounted via ntfs-3g in Debian /etc/fstab).  Sorry if you already know this, just thought I'd offer it if you don't.

Mark