I'm about to install Linux on a friends machine. He's currently running Windows. I need to resize his partitions (he's using 14GB for Windows out of 55GB for the HD. I'm thinking about using the GParted live CD. My question is: Has anyone lost any data resizing an NTFS partition? Is there any possibility of messing up? Does GParted check if there's data in the end of the partition?

I had a problem with installing Linux the first time and lost data, but a backup saved my butt. (I never used the Windows again, though.) However, though I'm going to back up, I'd rather not restore and restart. Also, is there any easy way to back up to a USB external hard drive using Linux? I'm thinking about using dd to write to the HD and if it fails write back. Would that work?

No, I didn't lose data.

BUT, there's a process that will help prevent you losing data. First run defrag. You'll probably see some green bars left somewhere that are marked as "unmoveable files" or the like. These are things like the system pagefile and the laptop hibernation storage file. This link tells you how to disable them and then run defrag again. Keep running it until there are no files in the last half of the drive. Don't re-enable these until after you've resized the hard disk.

You'll have to kind of guess as to how much actual free space is at the end. Take note of this appoximate amount of space free. Then reboot into the GParted Live CD and resize the NTFS partition. I also setup my shared FAT32 partition, swap, and /. But you can do those later if you want. Then I reboot into windows and make sure everything works fine, re-enable the pagefile and then go ahead with my linux install.

Thanks a lot! I've had incredible problems defragmenting before. *sigh*. That's why I love Linux filesystems. Yay reiserfs!

I just used Gparted, and I did not lose any of my data.

I just rebooted into Windows and I can see the partition that I created with the exact disk space that I setup under Ubuntu Live CD.

All the GUIs call ntfsresize under the covers. As such, no defragging (and screwing around with pagefile and such) is necessary.

I use ntfsresize all the time, and never had a problem. ntfsclone can be used (from Linux) to create a backup. All this is in the ntfsprogs package - a great piece of work.
See the home page.

I guess my first question is why do you want to resize when it appears that you have 41 GB free? I used GParted Live CD, version 0.2.5.5, to resize my Compaq. I didn't know I had an error in Windows, until I tried to resize and it said it could not continue. After I corrected the error in Windows, I was able to resize my windows partition, (made it smaller), without any loss of information.

Hello, I just got to this thread via google.

I've used ntfsresize once, and had one pretty major problem.

I attempted to resize my NTFS partition using GParted via the Ubuntu Live CD installer yesterday, and now it is broken. YMMV. I defragged, but perhaps I should have disabled page file and hibernation as well first.

Maybe it doesn't work if you play gnometris while you wait...

Installers are a whole different can of worms. In Ubuntus case the 6.10 one finally seems to be getting there.
How is your NTFS broken ???.

I am no fan of GUIs - I do any resizing "by hand" (i.e. CLI) prior to needing it.

To be honest, I'm not exactly sure what the problem was, but I was able to fix it fairly easily (and somewhat naively ) with TestDisk. Sorry for the lack of detail, it's late now and I'm just about to go to bed.

My second attempt (again with the Ubuntu 6.06 installer), having disabled paging and hibernation in Windows, was more successful; touch wood everything is fine now, with the disk partitioned as intended.

I see where you're coming from when you say that installers are a whole different can of worms, but at the same time, surely this is when a good bulk of NTFS resizing takes place. At that phase of the install, GParted was the program responsible, regardless of the fact that it had been called via an installer wizard... and GParted itself seems to be a fairly transparent interface to the command line tool; clicking the 'details' button displays the command that it's executing, which is essentially equivalent to what one'd run from a terminal.

Please let me know if I'm misguided here...

The concern I have is that if ntfsresize raises an error, the GUI simply closes with a "failed" message (message-box usually), and doesn't present the error.
This is unacceptable.

I've had it happen, and now I make sure I don't miss the errors anymore. My choice - each to their own.

That certainly is a legitamate reason for going the CLI way... although the GUI did give more specific messages than I reported here, I'm afraid I've been taking a rather ham-fisted approach to this install (it's my funeral if it all goes pear shaped). From my limited experience, I was rather imagining that it was all ending up in some log somewhere - perhaps that's wishful thinking... of course any logs created by a live cd are volatile, anyway; and I didn't bother to locate verify or backup these (imaginary?) logs.

It's an interesting point though, even if the error message in the dialog of a gui is identical to one output in a terminal, it's gone as soon as you click past it... which given the brazen approach people like me sometimes take to these things, is not really a good thing. One of my pet hates about error messages in dialogs (particularly in windows) is when you can't even copy the text... I've been known to take photos of error messages that I can't be bothered to process fully at the time they're presented...