I just got a laptop, and since I don't know how long it will take for me to get it configured properly, I'm leaving windows xp on it too. the catch is that I am resizing the partition. I defragged the drive, and then used qtparted on the knoppix disk. I have a 60gb drive and I would like to make the windows partition around 10gb. The problem is that I'm only able to resize the drive ntfs partition to about 30gb because windows places a contiguous file there for some reason (there doesn't appear to be any files after 3 gigabytes and before 30 gigabytes). So my question is there some sort of Disk Compaction utility that would allow me to move this contiguous file near the front of the partition? I would hate to have to waste 30gb on windows. Thanks for any help.

ntfs drives can be compressed themselves, but I don't understand your problem. What is the size of your data on the windows partition?

I don't need it to be compressed, I need it to be compacted. I have a 60gb harddrive with just windows at the beginning of it. For some reason, windows isn't contiguously installed at the front of the drive. Most of it is, but then there is a big hole (about 30 gb) and then there are a few more files. The files at the end are not fragmented, so when I try to defrag the drive, they are not moved. So if I try to resize the drive, I can only resize it to about 30, because the resizing tool (qtparted) thinks that the drive is fragmented because of that files installed around 30 gb in. So essentially I want to move all the windows files to the very front of the disk with no holes, so I'm not wasting any space when I resize it.

maybe try partition magic?

Another thing to try is to remove the Windows Paging File. Use Control Panel | System | Advanced | Performance Settings | Advanced | Virtual Memory | Change (under XP anyway!) and select the "no paging file" radio button---you will need to reboot for this to take effect. The paging file is often placed out far away from the normal run of files tha accumulate as you start to fill up a new machine. It is not movable, so the defragmenter does nothing with it.

What I've found after removing the paging file is that the defragmenter then goes into file compaction mode (even though it may tell you that you don't need to defrag---if you've already run this recently---just say yes anyway).

Be sure to set your paging file back on when you've finished reconfiguring the harddrive---it pretty critical for Windows performance.

I solved the problem a couple months ago. I reformatted the whole drive with fdisk. Making a 10GB NTFS partition, and then I used the other 50 GB for my linux partitions. I then reinstalled Windows on the 10 GB partition and then installed linux on the linux partitions. Thanks for your suggestion though.