Resizing NTFS partition to make room for FC10

[Tod Thomas]

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.



Thanks in advance - Tod