[PLUG] aha, you _can_ shrink an ntfs with free tools!

Matt Alexander lug at phxlinux.org
Sun Jun 27 13:49:02 UTC 2004


On Sun, 27 Jun 2004, Russell Senior wrote:

>
> A few of you may recall at the last clinic a guy who wanted to install
> linux on a box with Windows XP.  Most of us, seemingly, weren't sure
> about whether it was possible to repartition an ntfs installation with
> free tools.  I had shrunken a w2k fat32 filesystem a few years ago
> with a different tool.  Several people remembered GNU parted, and when
> we looked at that, we found that it didn't support (or didn't seem to
> support) ntfs.  We had punted to partition magic, which none of us
> actually had, so the guy we were trying to help was more or less SOL
> on the dual booting front. His windows xp software was a
> "quickrestore" type of thing that restored a 40gig filesystem, mashing
> flat everything in its path.  So we just nuked xp and started working
> on installing debian from CDs.  Due to the late-ish start, we didn't
> quite finish.
>
> Flash forward to last Thursday evening when he calls me at home for
> some help on installing Knoppix on his harddisk.  This is another
> thing I'd never done before, but with me at a networked desktop, I
> could at least find stuff/instructions online.  Pretty soon I realized
> that Knoppix included something called "qtparted" (IIRC) and also
> ("gee, this looks promising!") "ntfsresize".  A little fiddling and he
> is all fixed up with free tools.
>
> So, salt that one away.  It could come in handy in the future.

I assume this is what Mandrake uses.  When I need to resize an NTFS
partition for a dual-boot computer, I boot into Windows and defrag the
NTFS partition, then boot from a Mandrake 9.2 CD and resize the NTFS
partition, then I cancel the Mandrake install and install my distro of
choice.  I've never encountered any problems.
~M







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