In case of working with partitions *Please backup all you important data. *Its better to use Live CD to resize your partition, as gparted needs to unmount partitions before working on it.
As Hafiz Imtiaz said there is no separate partitions in Linux. The system Linux uses is called absolute path system. everything is kept under a single directory. Everything is a file in Linux, all your hardwares are located in /dev directory as files. Every devices have a *mount point<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_point> *. for storage devices mount points can be any folders under the / directory, So when you are browsing the folders in Linux it can be a Network drive or a removable storage or just a simple folder or a different partition. Its completly transparent. And if you format the / drive the other mounted storages *will not be formated*. You may have moticed when you attach your USB pen drive in Ubuntu+Gnome, its automatically mounted under /media/disk-* Say you have 2 PCS with Linux, both of them have user name darklord, you copy one PCs /home/darklord directory to a removable drive, then attach it to other PC and mount it in that PCs /home/darklord directory, you'll have all the settings and files of the first PC provided that both user Ids are same and you removable drive is formatted as a ext3 filesystem. And your older home folder will still be intact. So when we tell you that you should use a separate partition for your home folder, this means we are telling you to 1. have a separate ext3 partition 2. set its mount point to /home (you can do this when installing Linux or you can set in the /etc/fstab file) by following this, when you format the / partition your /home partition will be unharmed when you reinstall Linux you would be able to set that partitions mount point to home and have your documents and settings back :) I hope that was clear enough, As I'm not good at explaining stuffs :p
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