Unable to resize windows
 

I have 80G sata hd and boot Windows XP which has a 35g partition and 9 g used; an Ubuntu partition of 31g; a Puppy Linux frugal install in a partition about 4g.

I want to resize XP from 35g to about 30g. I have defragmented. Tried to resize with PM. It would not let me resize. Have tried to resize with Gparted on Puppy & Ubuntu and Gparted on Live CD. Also tried it on Parted Magic Live CD. What I get in all instances is a caution sign with an explanation point in the ntfs partition, and none of them will let me resize.

I successfully resized the XP partition last week when I installed Puppy frugal install.

I want to do a full install of Puppy Linux on the new partition.

How do I go about resizing that ntfs partition?

Somewhat of a newbie here.
Thanks.

If you successfully resized with Puppy's installer before, you should be able to resize now... Puppy now gives you errors where it did not before?

If I were *REALLY* risky, I might open fdisk, cfdisk, gparted, whatever and change the NTFS partition to FAT or similar, resize, then change back to NTFS, but this will probably hose all your NTFS data so I wouldn't risk it if I were you. But, if you get to the point where you decide to just reinstall from scratch, try that first -- that way, if it works, you save about two days of work reinstalling Windows, and if it doesn't work, you're only out something like 10 minutes of tinkering.

HIH

No error message. When I resize the XP ntfs partition down, the box changes it back to its original size. It also states the minimum size I can partition and maximum size are the same.

I really don't want to reinstall XP, and I can't do without it either. For day to day use, I use Linux 90% of the time.

But do you need 2 Linuxes? It is possible that the XP partition cannot be reliably shrunk past its current size. If that's what the partition management software is telling you then I believe it. If you really need to change things around you can use partimage on a live CD to make a backup of all of your partitions, then use cfdisk on a live CD to recreate all of your partitions, then use partimage to restore your operating systems (and the disk MBR if required).

I would be (am) satisfied with XP and one Linux system per machine.

I just like to "fiddle with" various linux os.

I did some reading on Parted Magic's web page. It talked about CLI resizing using ntfsresize. I tried ntfsresize and got some error messages. I went to XP install disk on recovery. Did a chkdsk /R and fixed the problem. I was then able to shrink the XP partition. However, gparted doesn't like more than 4 partitions on a hard drive. So will have to decide whether to delete Puppy Frugal to install Puppy 4. Puppy is nice for fast response web surfing,writing documents. Ubuntu is my workhorse. XP I only use when I must.

Thanks for the response.

Sometimes the win xp "swap", the virtual memory places itself
say 25% or less from the top of the partition.
You can try to disable the virtual memory, before resizing.
(You can actually see the virtual memory when defragmenting.)

I use "diskdrake" from PCLinuxOS livecd or the same from the
Mandriva install dvd for resizing, diskdrake will only resize
to what is available.

Alternatively : use a second hard disk for linux.

Rgds

Four partition limit? Are they all master partitions? Reason being, I have hda1, the first primary, and hda2, the extended. Inside of hda2 I have hdas 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. I realize it's akin to the way we used to do it in DOS back in the day, but it works for me...

I would try disabling the XP page file, as knudfl suggested, then defrag, before resizing.

Thanks for the replies. I will try some of your suggestions when.....er if, the problem happens again.

The chkdsk -R took care of it this time.