Resizing NTFS partition to make room for FC10

[Robert L Cochran]

I use the g4u disk cloning tool for chores like this. Forget the 80 Gb
spare drive. It is too small for what should be done. Instead get a new
spare drive.

I make sure I have a spare disk of the same type, physical dimensions
and capacity as the source disk and I use the g4u software to clone from
the source drive to the spare. This is usually means putting the spare
drive in an external drive enclosure which I know can be a chore.

When the cloning operation is done, I remove the source disk from the
machine of interest and replace it with the spare disk. This lets me
ensure that Windows XP boots. From then on all disk operations are done
on this disk. The steps I follow are:

* Defragment the NTFS partition
* Download the very latest gparted live cd and boot to it
* Resize the ntfs partition with gparted. It is quite reliable.
* Boot the resized NTFS partition. Windows XP will probably start chkdsk
at boot time, and that can take a little while, but all should be well.

Once you are sure you can boot into XP, shut down the computer and
install Fedora with the unallocated free space.

If something terrible happens...no problem! You still have the original
disk. You can re-clone as needed.

Bob Cochran









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
>
> 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
>