Hello,
I just want to let you know that I have only been using computers for about 4- 6 months period, and ubuntu about 3-4 days.

So, I recently installed Ubuntu by shrinking my vista hdd from within vista(home premium), which is doing well. Ubuntu was doing well too, until I decided to create /home, I didn't completely understand the concept of /home, I was just following steps off a website. So, what I done is created a 15GB partition for /home and left... "/"root- 80 GB...., so I now have them backwards, ..

Is there anyway I can get that (empty) 15GB partition back? or even better,move "/" to it?
I have the Live CD with gparted of course, but dont have any idea how to use it to expand, or rejoin partitions or anything like that. I know I can create another partition for /home by cutting about 60 GB out of the 80 GB partition that "/" root resides in, but then, there will be no way for me to join or use the other 15GB partition that I originally cut for /home. I am going to see what else I can find. If anyone knows how to get this straightened out, Please, fill me in.

On a side note....
I'm a little skeered of doing a reinstall with manual partitioning, cause I don't want to mess up vista!, and I'm not sure if that would solve my problem anyway. I also thought about reinstalling it by letting it choose the largest "empty" space(which would be the 15GB space, right?), and then removing '/" from the 80GB space it is in now, but dont have a clue how to remove/uninstall it, or if its even possible to take that route, and worried about creating boot problems if I do it. I can't be the first person who has made this mistake, So, If anyone has a solution to this problem please fill me in and give tips or sites where I can do more research please. and Thank you for reading my post!

PS. I am running off the live cd right now, and probably will be until I get this solved....

Well, I was able to delete that 15GB partition and grow the original one, so this is solved....thank you anyway!

Take control of your partitions with gparted or the like, as you have done. You can boot to System Rescue Disc and manipulate your partitions without messing with Vista. It's not at all scary or difficult but resizing the right way can take some time. The bigger the resize or partiton, the longer it will take. Plan for hours. I know you're good now -- but for later. When you've got the Jones.

Typical / partitons on a Linux box don't need to be so large. Hell, vista needs 15gb just to install (that's fuggen crazy) but you can make a 5Gb partiton for your Linux root and be happy forever, even if you keep /var within that partiton and run a web server. I always partition (when I can) 3 Gb for / and 3-5 for /var/ Of course, if you're one of those folks that installs everything under the sun, make your / (root) partition a little bigger. Or, make another partition for /usr and make that one 5Gb and keep / at 1GB. All the stuff you will install will go to /usr or /usr/local or maybe /opt (Google stuff goes there and anything "system wide" for users should go there, too. Like, installing Firefox from the tar file for all your users.

There are situations where more than 10Gb, or even more, would be appropriate, but you'll probably never see those. /var gets big because of log files, but you can control those, too.

With gparted you can do quite a lot, repositioning partitions, resizing, copying data from, etc.