I opened/booted GParted and tried to resize the partition to 31 gigs (its a 80GiB HDD) and it kept saying that an error had occurred and couldn't complete. I have XP on the drive mentioned before, and Ubuntu on a 12GiB HDD. I want to put Ubuntu and XP on the big drive and mess around on the 12GiB with other distros. How do i wipe the 80GiB drive? will GParted wipe but not resize?

Gparted has the ability to wipe the drive. Regarding the resizing issue, be sure to defragment that Win partition before going any further. Also, if you are not using the Gparted LiveCD I highly recommend choosing that method. You will be assured of having the most recent version and not worrying about any mounting problems.

i wiped the drive. can GParted resize a Linux partition?

Yeah, GParted can resize a Linux partition.

I had the exact same problem a while back trying to resize an NTFS partition that had WinXP on it for about 4 years - I tried defragmenting, as well as every trick I could find regarding NTFS partitions and Partition Magic (which, incidentally, couldn't resize it either.) Finally I had to do what you did and simply wipe it and start over.

Note that I WAS able to resize an XP NTFS partition on a brand-new Dell laptop using GParted, so I suspect it's not a problem with GParted itself, but rather something that XP does to NTFS partitions after it's been running for a while.

Besides a defrag, you may also need to turn off system restore and delete any existing system restore files, as well as temporarily disable virtual memory. I needed to do all these things in order to resize the NTFS partition on a new HP laptop. At that point, the gParted LiveCD worked fine. You also need to remember to apply the changes as you go, or it may produce an error.