I am trying to install Fedora or Ubuntu (both fail) on a desktop. It has been an XP Home box for a couple years and had a 155GB HD with about 130GB of stuff. I cleaned it up, defragged for three days, and then began an Ubuntu install.

First off, there was insufficient free space to install it, so I tried to shrink the NTFS partition. The output revealed bad sectors. So I rebooted and ran "chkdsk /f /r" in Windows, let it reboot itself, and it said it fixed the bad sectors.

I then booted onto the Ubuntu Live CD and ran ntfsresize with the -b switch. I resized to about 130GB so I'd have 25GB free (there is 109 GB of data on the NTFS partition and it was recently defragged, so shrinking down to 130GB shouldn't be a problem, right?)

Ntfsresize completed successfully and now tells me a new size. Ubuntu and Fedora, however, still do not allow me to install. They still see the partition as being its original 155GB or whatever it was. When I try to shrink from the install, I get the same message about bad sectors keeping ntfsresize from running.

I have booted with the GParted Live CD as well, and it also shows the original partition size before I shrank it.

Running fdisk -l shows me a list of my partitions but in "blocks" rather than sizes. I did "fdisk /dev/hda" and "w" to write that table to disk. Nothing changed. I also tried running the Windows Recovery Console and running "fixmbr" to see if that would change anything. It didn't.

You can probably tell I've done a ton of Google searching and troubleshooting on this: to no avail so far. The Windows drive still functions fine, all data is accessible, and "My Computer" even shows that C:\ is now around 130GB - the size I wanted it to end up at.

So why does Windows recognize that I resized the partition but Linux does not?

Any assistance will be greatly appreciated.

Also, GParted Live CD will not allow me to resize the NTFS partition either. It says that it cannot read the contents of the drive, so it won't even tell me how much space is used on it. It did allow me to delete my other NTFS partition (RECOVERY) but the main one cannot be mounted or anything.

that dose not always work , as you have found out

REINSTALL windows XP and import your NOW LOST data from your back-ups
You DID make back up RIGHT ???

Everything is still operational. I want this partition to shrink!

in xp then remove about 30 gig's of data , then defrag again and use xp's built in partition editor to resize it ( or gparted )

but MAKE a back up of ALL IMPORTANT data FIRST
resizing a partition may or might not work correctly . even if YOU do EVERYTHING 100% correct

I've already removed a bunch of data (enough so that I should have at least 10-15 GB of free space after the drive shrinks) and defragged. Windows Disk Defragmenter analysis tells me the drive is only a few percent fragmented and doesn't need anymore defragging.

Also XP doesn't have a built-in partition editor. My only option, it seems, is something like Gparted, which does not work per the errors above.