[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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