Hi everyone,

I am trying to repartition a single partition 80G harddrive, with WinXP installed on it. Only 8G of that space is used. However when I try to repartition with ntfsresize, I can only get 24G of free space. In other words, it seems that those 8Gigs are spread over 50something GB on a hardrive.

I think I know what the problem is. When defragmenting the harddrive, I can see that some files are positioned at the "far end" of the disk and are not movable (green colored). If I had nftsresize version 1.11.2 or later, this wouldn't be the problem, as this version can repartition even badly fragmented HD. Unfortunately, I am using the version 1.9.4 that I have on Knoppix 3.9 live CD. (I currently have a dial up internet connection so downloading the latest version of Knoppix with the latest version of ntfsresize is out of the question.)

My question is the following: is there a way to find out exactly what those unmovable files are? I am thinking, it is quite possible that I don't really need them, and that I could delete them (they are altogether maybe 10MB of data), which could free 40GB of space on my harddrive.

Thanks. Hopefully my intro wasn't too long.

I'm not sure what those files are, and it's a pain in the neck. Ultimately, (this was a few years ago) I erased windows, repartitioned the drive, and included a small ntfs partition, installed linux, and then installed windows last. This worked fine, although I erased the original Windows partition. This wasn't a problem for me since I did it when the laptop was brand new, and you may be looking for an easier option that doesn't erase any existing data.

That file in the end is the $MFT which stores all the important info about all other files. Deleting it would mean destroying all your data.

Only ntfsresize 1.12.0 can move this file safely (not even the Windows defragmenters). Actually it's easy: just download the static binary from the ntfsresize faq site (google for it), unpack and use it (there are step by step instructions). If you don't want to do the fdisk part manually then you could use qtparted. Qtparted will work if you do the ntfsresize manually beforehand.