Resizing NTFS partition to make room for FC10

[Tod Thomas]

Matthew Flaschen wrote:
> Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
>   
>> 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
>>>       
>
> That was a bad idea.  You've copied the MBR of hdb to the MBR of hda.
> That's why the hda disk "thinks" the disk is 150 GB.  What you should do
> is zero the mbr of hda
>
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1
>
> Then, use GParted (or whatever) to create a partition on hda (probably
> hda1) of the exact same size as the old XP partition (probably hdb1)
> You may as well partition the other 60 GB of hda at the same time.
>
> Then, you should be able to do:
>
> dd if=/dev/hdb1 of=/dev/hda1 bs=512
>
> to copy over the XP partition.
>
> As usual, you should do backups before such operations and understand
> the risks if you do not.
>
> Matt Flaschen
>
>   
Thanks.  I thought that recreating the partition using fdisk would have 
accomplished the same thing - no?  If not what does the fdisk process I 
followed
do or not do?


Tod