allright here's the deal:

i have two 160 gig drives that are full of data that are in my new linux machine. they are NTFS drives, that i now wish to have as linux partitions so that i can read/white to them. problem is they are full. so i came up with this genius idea as to how to solve this. i had another machine that has about 40 gigs free on it. so i networked it all together, and copied about 40 gigs off of one of the drives to other said machine. my plan, was to take the now duplicate 40 gigs of info, delete it on a win xp machine, bring it over to the linux machine, resize the partition down, make a linux partition, copy some more over (to the linux part), resize, copy, etc until i was done.

at any rate, i got the files copied off so i could make space, but now i can't seem to get YaST's (oh yeah sorry, SuSE 10 here ) partitioning program to stop insisting that my NTFS drive is still mounted. i've used umount to attempt to unmount it (which is does very well, but doesn't change what the partitioning program says), i've used YaST to not mount at boot, and (yes, i'm a windows guy), i've done it all and rebooted and done it all again, and still no luck.

is there something else i should do? or is it just possessed?

Have you tried using fdisk (or maybe cfdisk) instead. You can also install qtparted if you don't like working in the command line.

i don't have fdisk (i have no idea why..?), and i didn't see fdisk, cfdisk, or qtparted in YaST.. unfortunatly i haven't quite figured out how to install programs yet in linux or i would go look the programs up and download/install them. i did however find ntfsresize, ran it and shrunk the volume down to about 106 gigs (i think -- the partioning program in YaST is still reading it as 146 gigs, contary to konqurer and anything else i saw). unfortuanly i think this did more harm then good -- i can't mount it and read it anymore.. but then again it said i should use fdisk next.. witch again, i have not for some reason.

Switch to root and you should be able to access fdisk (or cfdisk).

Hey reddazz...

I can't PM anyone and I got a question, a kind of private question and I wanna ask it. Please excuse me if I am violating any rules or anything...

What is the name of the program that is visible to the right side of your KDE screenshot? It is the one with all the system info and stuff. And where do you find good wallpapers like those?

Again sorry...

An email to me would have been better than highjacking someones thread. The two themes running are liquid weather++ (using the cynapses skin) and cynapses (the system monitor). These are superkaramba themes available from kde-look.org. You can get good wallpapers from kde-look.org and deviantart.com.

lol.

Do'h! how i didn't do that to begin with, i don't know.. since i had to switch to root to umount. lol. that does explain why i couldn't "find" fdisk.

so i went into fdisk. here's what happened:

i did fdisk /dev/hdc

i got some warning about the number of cylinders being greater then 1024. (there are 19456)

i hit v to verify the table; it said, 5165 unallocated sectors.

so i hit w, it said:

The Partition table has been altered!

calling ioctl() to re-read the partition table.

WARNING: Re-Reading the partition table failed with error 16: Device to resource busy.
The kernel still uses the old table.
The new table will be used at next reboot.
Syncing disks.

so i rebooted.

then i fdisk /dev/hdc1 (the part i was to shrink)

same warning about greater then 1024.

so i hit v for verifying to partition table, i got:

Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundry.
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundry.
Warning: Partition 1 overlaps partition 2.
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundry.
Total allocated sectors 1701990412 greater than the maximum 312576642

then i tried to make a new partition, no luck there.

so i quit w/o saving changes.

reloaded fdisk /dev/hdc, same warning about more the 1024.
hit v to verify again, said 5165 unallocated sectors.
then i tired to make a new part, that failed again.
so i hit w to exit, saving changes and got:

The Partition table has been altered!

Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.
Syncing Disks.

so i rebooted.

and now, the partitioning program in YaST, is still not letting me do anything to the drive when it's not mounted.

so for one, i'm not wholly sure i did anything. if i fdisk -l /dev/hdc it still says that i have one partition that is the size of the disk. YaST's parting program reads the partition as 148 gigs, but if i try to resize it, it's reading it as 106.
i feel like i'm missing something, any ideas?

btw, i apologize for any difficulties reading this, i had to type in everything that the term window said since the machine is not on the net atm.

you know.. i think the real question here is still the same.. that is why can't YaST's part'ing program resize the partition?

and one more update (if i can keep from spamming posts... lol), i used ntfsresize to resize to partition back to the full size of the disk. Yast's part program still won't let me resize it.

I am not really sure what causing the problem but maybe you need to use fdisk to delete all partitions on the disk and then try and use YAST to create new ones. I would also install qtparted and try that because its a very good partitioning tool. If you keep experiencing problems download a copy of Mepis Live CD, boot into that and use qtparted to sort out the partitioning.

Deleting partitions would normally destroy all the data on them. Seeing that not all your data is copied over it's best to back it up before fiddling.

I also got a bit confused as to why you did a verify operation in fdisk. The 1024 cylinder warning shouldn't matter. And you should be using something else to resize partitions (see previous posts).

well that was the entire complication i had.. there's about a 100-120 gigs of data on the drive, and i have nowhere (short of cds...) to back it up onto. so i was trying to see if i could resize the partition down a touch, make a linux part on it, and then copy stuff over bit by bit, shrinking the ntfs part every time.

i did however do some research a found that knoppix has qtprated with it (since my about 8 hour endeavor to install it myself failed). i got it booted and started to resize it when my monitor died (witch i was needless to say not to happy about ). so i don't know if it actually resized since i don't have another monitor yet and i'm all but afraid to touch the machine till i get one. at any rate, i should be getting a new one tomorrow, so i'll post again (hopefully tomorrow) once i figure out what is going on.

allright.. so uh.. the partition is toast now. downside is, that this was obviously my fault.. up side however is that i don't have to worry about it. i'm just gonna format the drive and move on now. sadly this one didn't come to a happy ending. however i do thank all of you for your help. if anything, i learned a lot about how all this works.

What a lovely desktop, but too bad you aren't using Style Clock to complete it.
Especially Centurion Theme.
http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=14423

I prefer the clock in kicker, thats why I didn't use any other superkaramba clocks from kde-look.org. Style Clock looks good though.