I have an XP system at work that I would like to setup as dual boot with fedora. The problem is that XP's partition occupies the entire HDD. I need to resize it without destroying any data on the win partition. I know that there are various tools that will do this, but some are better than others. I tried this once with partition magic 8. Actually, more than once. It has successfully done the job probably 4 times for me, but it failed on my laptop PC, and I lost all the data (well...what I didn't have backed up).

My question? What (in your opinion) is the best tool for the job? Keep in mind that I would prefer cheaper, or free software for numerous reasons. It is important that I don't ruin my hard drive since it is a work PC.

Thx for your input.

The only software that I know of is Partition Magic.
This is retail software and I'm sure costs $40 or more.

No matter what tool you choose I strongly suggest that you backup your data on windows before touching the partition.
-Jason

Partition Magic is the way to go. I too have a laptop at work and successfully resized my NTFS partition using it. I now dual boot between Windoze XP Pro and SimplyMepis 3.3
I don't know which version of Partition Magic you're using but 8.0.4 seems to work fine.
For me anyway.

Preferably defragment before you resize, no matter which tool you use.

If it is a NTFS partition then Qtparted which comes with several Linux distros will resize it. I have used Qtparted to shrink NTFS partitions to get free space on a drive to install another OS like Linux and it worked fine.

Like always, back up first.

this works great for resizing , just don't install if you don't plan on purchasing it. http://www.bootitng.com/bootitng.html