Gparted help asap!
 

Hey all, Im new to dual booting and so forth so was following APc mags explanations so I could dual boot with suse. Every time I go to apply the resizing of the partition it comes up with an error but doesnt explain whats wrong.. Im on XP atm and have no idea what it could possibly be.
Can anyone help me? Are there any australian numbers i can call for diect assistence?
Thanks

You should post the error message. Also post a little about the computer specs, if it is a OEM model like HP or Dell, Toshiba, just post the make & model if it's too tough figuring out the specs as that info can be obtained from the manufacturers web site. Most important at this point is the size of the hard drive and wether XP is using all of it.

Hey again. It just comes up with: "An error occured while applying the operations" but doesnt say anything beyond that and just undoes what it was doing. Now when I boot from the Gparted CD it will no longer show me how much of the hard disk is occupied or let me change the size of the windows partition at all even before "applying" the actions. Im using a HP notebook DV1000 with its custom version of XP. I recently formatted the hard disk so i could put everything on linux so theres only about 10G occupied and I was going to give it around 25G of my 80G.
I need my laptop for uni on monday but everything keeps stuffing up. Ive even tried downloading a diff copy of Gparted from a mirror but it does exactly the same thing. If anyone could help me out or maybe give me a number of somewhere in australia I could contact for assistence it would be more than appreciated. Im just fristrating myself trying over and over.

Are you sure there wasn't a recovery partition on the disk?

Yeah, theres a recovery partition but I was only partitioning the main hardrives usage. Its a 100G hard-drive overall but the main used section for the actual OS and operations is about 80G.

Well

Bootitng has no problems with "non-destructive" re-sizing NTFS FAT32 partitions, download it, unpack it in Windows, click on the .exe and a DOS window opens, follow instructions to make a bootitng floppy or ISO CD to use bootitng. Put the floppy/CD in the drive and re-boot, click "Cancel" to avoid installing to the hard drive, click OK to go into maintenance, click on "Partition work" icon and in the window that appears should be an entry for HD0 with your small partition at the top and free space below. Highlight the OS partition, click on resize button on the left, wait as it does a filesystem check, it will show you the size of the partition and minimum & maximum size. Change the middle field to reflect more or less how many Megabytes you want the partition to be. For approx. 20GB size, put 20000, etc. Then click OK and wait till it says "Complete". Click on "View MBR" to make sure your Windows partition is marked "Active", hit "Save" and the close. Pull out the floppy/CD and re-boot.

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/

there are 3 partitions. 1 is recovery, 1is virt RAM aqnd the last is the major mem Im trying to partition.

Ive done all that, except now it wont let me alter the sizing of that partition at all when before it would and it also no longer shows me how much room is occupied. The error was occurring when when I clicked apply to apply the changes to the partition size it loads for a while then comes up with the error mentioned above. Im just incredibly frustrated with the whole thing.

If you have the XP install CD, then you can do the following
boot from CD, and reach the point where the installer asks you "where to install windows", choose custom and delete all the partitions make the partitions reqd for windows and leave the space intended for linux unpartitioned and go ahead with install. The installer will format the c: partition, but rest you will have to do once the windows boots up.
After that you can install linux on unpartitioned space and dual boot

Are you still able to boot into Windows? It's beginning to sound as if the partition table has somehow been damaged.

Also it is a good idea to defragment ntfs partitions a couple of times before they are resized.

found an error report. (btw it is now allowing me to see the size occupied and letting me resize before applyi9ng but still not letting me apply the actions).
"You might resize at 8259555328 bytes or 8260MB (freeing 63547 MB). Please make a test run using both the -n and -s options before resizing!"

actual error:
"ntfsresize v1.13.1.1 (libntfs 9:0:0)
ERROR(95): Opening '/dev/sda1' as NTFS failes: Operation not supported. The NTFS file is unclean. Please shutdown windows properly before using this software! Note, if you have run chkdsk previously then boot windows again which will automatically initialize the journal correctly."

???

I can still boot into windows fine but it has decided to randomly add an admin account with a password not set by anyone. I made sure I defragged and everything before I started my attempts.

stupid thing worked damnit! it just decided to work! If anyone knows why it worked i would be very happy to know.

It just decided to work? LOL.

Probably because you first had to boot-up Windows to have Windows do a file system check and possibly fix a couple minor details. Are you writing this from Windows on the laptop, assuming you got passed the new Administrator.