how do i shrink and divide the ubuntu partition after installing it alongside windows XP?

Solution 1:

1. Back up your data first. Resizing your partitions usually goes without any problem, but there is always a small chance something will go wrong and you will need to restore from backup.

2. Boot the live, desktop CD.

3. Unmount your swap partition, either from gparted or from the command line.

   sudo swapoff -a

4. Start gparted and reduced the size of your Ubuntu partition -> apply changes -> make a new data partition -> apply changes.

5. When you boot Ubuntu you may want to add the new partition into fstab.

If it is a ntfs partition, use the following options:

/dev/your_data_partition  /media/data  ntfs-3g auto,permissions  0  0

You can then set ownership and permissions with chown and chmod

See:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Fstab

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FilePermissions