Resizing NTFS partition to make room for FC10

[Mikkel L. Ellertson]

Tod Thomas wrote:
> I know this is a little off topic.  I did google around looking for the
> correct forum to post this question but had little luck.  If anyone can
> make an informed suggestion I'd very much appreciate it.
> 
> I have a 150GB ATA disk, /dev/hdb, containing winxp.  I'd like to move
> the contents to an spare 80GB ATA disk, /dev/hda, to make room for a
> full install of FC10 on the larger disk in preparation for ultimately
> getting the winxp install running under a linux based VM.
> 
> From knoppix, I started by using ntfsresize to shrink the xp partition
> down to 20GB.  That worked suprisingly fine.
> I then installed the smaller drive and used dd to copy over the image of
> the xp installation:  dd if=/dev/hdb of=/dev/hda bs=10000000 count=2000
> 
> I rebooted and voila! it worked - sort of.  The new disk boots xp but it
> still, according to fdisk, thinks its 150GB.  So I used fdisk to delete
> and redefine the xp partition (primary, bootable type=7) with the new
> size of the drive, 20GB.  After rebooting xp came up but then started
> quickly blue screening a message I couldn't read, and rebooting.  This
> repeated in a loop until I just rebooted.  I tried the whole process
> over again but this time specified 80GB to dd and fdisk, same disaster.
> 
> I tried everything again, but this time instead of fdisk I fired up
> gparted to see if I could resize from there hoping that if it could some
> magic would also fix the invalid sizing detected by fdisk.  gparted
> could see the drive but couldn't recognize it as having anything it
> could work with.  I highlighted the drive and the progress bar stayed gray.
> 
> So far it seems I can use the drive this way without causing xp any
> problems.  The issue is things just don't look right and I suspect it
> will come back to bite me one day.  I'm not an expert at manipulating
> bits on a hard drive just yet.  Could someone point me to my error?  Is
> what I'm trying do-able?  If its a conceptual problem a little education
> would come in handy too.
> 
You would be better off using parted or one of the GUI interfaces
for it. It will resize, as well as copy/move partitions. It is a
much better tool for doing things like this then dd is.

One other note - make sure you run defrag on the disk in windows
before trying to resize partitions.

Mikkel
-- 

  Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!

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