Resizing NTFS partition to make room for FC10

[Aldo Foot]

On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 12:05 PM, Tod Thomas <fr33zone at gmail.com> 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.

I wouldn't use dd for this. Gparted has been more helpful to me in a
situation similar to yours. Using Gparted (a) I'd  first create a NTFS
partition (make sure to create it As Primary),
(b) copy the partition from the source drive to the target drive, and
(c) if there's
a problem booting the target drive with xp in it, use a winxp cd to go into
rescue mode and use FIXMBR to fix the master boot record.

Gparted copies partitions pretty well.

~af