QTparted and NTFS resizing

[Charles Curley]

On Sun, Aug 27, 2006 at 04:28:20PM +0200, Nigel Henry wrote:
> I know this isn't strictly FC, but am running out of harddrive space, and need 
> somewhere to put FC6, when I can psych myself up for another 8days of iso 
> downloads on dialup.

Good grief. Where are you? Perhaps someone here would be kind enough
to ship you a DVD or some CDs.

> 
> 
> Knoppix 5.0's QTparted, version-0.4.5-cvs gets the info ok for hdb (the fixed 
> drive), but when trying to get the info for hda (XP in the caddy) the 
> progress bar on the "get info" pane is at 100% and a few seconds later 
> QTparted crashes.
> 
> Any suggestions as to what is causing QTparted to crash when trying to get 
> info from the NTFS formatted XP drive?

I had problems with Knoppix 4.02, and ended up using a statically
linked parted. The gory details are at
http://www.charlescurley.com/Lenovo.R51.html.

I've been very pleased with finnix (http://www.finnix.org/) for this
sort of job.

> 
> XP is using 8.9GB of a 40GB drive, and the defrag analyse utility shows a lot 
> of data at the beginning of the drive, then a lot of blank space, then 
> another bunch of data with some unmoveable files, but there appears to be at 
> least half of the drive available for resizing. I'm not too bothered about 
> loosing XP, as even though it has quite a few music apps on it, I never use 
> it now, apart from updating the 3rd party security. System restore is 
> disabled, so that Norton Ghost can work on it.

The reason Windows won't move those "unmovable" files it that it may
be using them by direct access at the LBA level, plus a few other
reasons that all have to do with Windows. However, if you aren't
running Windows at the time, that isn't an issue. You dhould be able
to use the ntfsprogs tools to resize regardless of such clusters.

However, back it up first. ntfsclone (in ntfsprogs) will do the job.

-- 

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