Re: Resizing NTFS partition to make room for FC10

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.

You would be better off using parted or one of the GUI interfaces
for it. It will resize, as well as copy/move partitions. It is a
much better tool for doing things like this then dd is.

One other note - make sure you run defrag on the disk in windows
before trying to resize partitions.

Mikkel
--

Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!

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