LinuxQuestions.org - Installation Help Needed !

OK, here's the way it is.

NTFS is the default filing system for Windows XP. The open source Linux NTFS tools can read to, but not write or resize NTFS partitions. That's because NTFS is extremely complicated, and has had to be reverse engineered from scratch.

Therefore, no mainstream distro today can resize NTFS partitions. A few distros are shipping commercial resizing tools, examples being Xandros and SuSE Office desktop. The open source NTFS resize code is currently in beta, so hopefully this situation will be resolved soon. Until then, your out of luck unless you buy Partition Magic, which can resize NTFS partitions.

This presents us with a problem. All new desktop machines have their harddisks entirely filled with an NTFS partition. Worse still, most people don't actually own an XP CD, so they can't simply backup their data and blow away the installation - the recovery CD will wipe any Linux partitions it finds iirc.

The only solution as present is to pay for commercial NTFS resize code (normally licensed from MS) and resize your partitions that way. Hopefully within the next few months Anton and Flatcap will begin shipping stable resize code, and this mini-crisis will be resolved.