Hi, I am a complete newbie and got stuck in the very first phases of trying to install linux.

I have a compaq presario 3230us laptop. At present it has only one partition. I am trying to avoid having to buy partition magic. So I tried resizing the Windows partition using Qtparted on Knoppix cd. I am able to put in the changes I want, but when I hit "commit", I soon get an error saying that Windows did not shut down completely.

Any ideas?

If you are running Knoppix from CD, I cannot understand why the Windows error appeared. Perhaps the drive was mounted and needed to be unmounted before committing changes? Can you elaborate a little more on the exact steps you took when resizing? Did the error appear when booting Windows or, as you stated, when you hit commit? If you have not already done so, and it is not too late, it may be a good idea to back up any important files you will need before attempting any operations of this nature.

I recently used Knoppix and qtparted to resize an NTFS partition with WindowsXP installed and create linux and swap partitions on a new Toshiba Satellite laptop. Everything went smoothly, and, upon restarting Windows, checkdisk was invoked and a reboot was necessary for Windows. After that, installing linux was a breeze. I installed GRUB to the MBR and both operating systems boot with no problems.

Thanks for jumping in on this one, cybrog.
Here is more data:

The error that I get is from qtparted, not from windows. This time it occurred when I hit "ok" after trying to resize the Windows partition. The error reads: "Filesystem check failed! Windows wasn't shutdown properly or inconsistent."

Here is the info from "Drive Info":
device: /dev/hda
model: Fujitsu MHT2060AT PL
capacity: 57231.6
length sectors: 117710240
status: busy

Here is the tabular information abot the current partitions:
01, /dev/hda1, ntfs, active, 55.88 gb, n/a, .03mb, 55gb
02, /dev/hda-1, free, _, 7.84mb, n/a, 55.88gb, 55.89gb

Here are the properties for each of the partitions:
01: primary partition, .0307617 --> 57223.7, grow left .0307617, grow right 57231.6
02: primary partition, 57223.7 --> 57231.6, grow left 0, grow right 0

I thought perhaps I should make the windows partition inactive, as a preliminary to resizing it. When I tried changing this, I got a confirmation alert: "change active partition to (no active on drive)?" I chickened out at that point. I wasn't sure it was such a good idea to deactivate the only active partition on the drive.

Any thoughts?

I'm not sure what you can do about this. I don't think Windows will be able to boot if you change its active status. What version of knoppix are you using?