I have SuSE 7.3 on a reiserfs formatted primary hda, boot on ext2 hda3, and swap on hda5. I want to run vmware. Vmware installs but win xp and win 98 wont install they hang when the cd should be booted. I suspect my problems are related to problems with reiser and want to try an ext2 partition. I therefore need to reduce the size of the reiser drive while maintaining data integrity. I found the following text on the reiser website which seems to answer my queries. Has anyone any experience of this and any tips -apart from back up first. Also cfdisk does not give an option for resize, what is the 8 in cfdisk(8) is it a resize switch (Ijust get a syntax error message).

/*
The resize_reiserfs program allows to grow a ReiserFS on-line if there is a free space on block device.
If you wish to shrink an ReiserFS partition, first use resize_reiserfs to shrink the filesystem. You may then use cfdisk(8) to shrink the device. When shrinking the size of the device, make sure you do not make it smaller than the reduced size of the ReiserFS filesystem. */

If anyone has any other thoughts about the vmware problem it would be appreciated. The need for windows is purely for OCR software that compares with textbridge, I can only find graphics scanning software online.

Just a hunch but I don't think reiserfs is the cause of the problems here.

reiserfs is merely the filesystem that lives on a partition. Windoze OS's see anything other than FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS (any others?) partitions as "other" and ignores them. The only thing that should bother them is that Win wants to be the FIRST partition on the FIRST drive. That and some crazed MBR issues...

Thanks but mbr should not be an issue with vmware as it runs the os in a virtual machine with a virtual (though persistent drive). Because vmware can get up and running but I can't create a virtual machine, Ive even tried linux as a a vm within linux, I cant think what else it can be other than vmware virtual machines need ext2 rather than reiser. But then I'm just guessing here and can't be sure until I can try.

Richard

I once installed vmware on a mandrake box with reiserFS, win98se loaded and worked better than it ever did on bare metal. What error messages are you getting?

Actually the error message, or lack of, is half the problem. The vm disk BIOS comes up in the VMware window and the cd drive sometimes gives a whirl - sometimes not - then the VMware window appears to clear and remain black. Nothing else happens except that closing it down takes about 2-3 minutes. I used to have an early version of vmware on ext2 and found it ok I prefer win4lin for running work apps but they do not have usb support which I need (Ihave a fair amount of text to scan using a usb scanner).

Richard