Hello,

I'm looking for a way to resize my harddrive partitions, and I've stumbled upon, amongst other things, Gparted.

But I have a question. Can Gparted resize a partition, without erasing the data on it? A NTFS partition, to be more precise, with Windows Vista installed on it.

To be honest, I'm looking for a replacement for Partition Magic, since it does not seem to work with NTFS partitions on a Vista-based system.

In my experience Gparted is all I use unless I have no other choice.
Before I destroyed my XP/Ubuntu dual boot with Unetbootin accidently, I had a great setup.
I didn't have a Windows recovery cd and luckily all went well.
Note-
#1 Have a Windows Recovery CD/Install CD

#2 Back-up everything you think is important! Either to DVD/USB whatever-but not the HD.

#3 Do a complete cleaning of tmp files, etc.

#4 Defrag it completely (defragging moves the files closer to the beginning of the partition.)

#5 Reboot and run for a while after defragging/cleaning.

#6 Reboot again into the linux cd.

#7 When using Gparted, shrink the HD/partition from right to left, that is-give Linux the back of the partition. On my PC all the Windows stuff was at the beginning of the partition.

I didn't try to move any partitions left or right, just gave Windows the first half of (sda1/hda1) and shrank it down, moving the little "bar" from right to left.
SEE screenshot.

See how the data is at the beginning of each partition?

For reference my install usng Gparted went well.

Yes - it's excellent. Handles Vista NTFS fine so long as the filesystem has no errors in it. They have to be corrected from Vista, but gparted will not do anything after the check, and tell you to run chkdsk (from Windows).
I always use the gparted liveCD to avoid issues with mounted partitions.

BTW, the disk manager in Vista is now quite good - wouldn't resize below 50% for me though, so I had to use gparted as well to get the size I wanted. On restart Vista will go into (disk) recovery - took almost an hour on my 320 Gig (laptop) drive.

Thank you. I'll make backups and give it a try.

I've used gparted to resize vista ntfs partitions without any problems. I usually defrag the ntfs partition from within Windows and then resize using gparted.