ok, here goes..

Ive got a laptop with xp installed on the 40GB HD. I wanna resize the ntfs partition so that i can have roughly half NTFS, half ext3 (or maybe a FAT as well, but this isnt important).

I have so far used mandrake's gui ntfs resizer after defragging etc, and could only get 8GB free from the evil clutches of windows.

The reason for this is that there is a block of files right at the end of the ntfs partition, and heaps of space in between, so the resizer hits these files and doesnt give me any more room.

Is there anything that I can do except crazily go through deleting files??

I would think there would be someway of being able to see which files exactly are the ones sitting at the end of the partition so i can delete them or whatever. Or does anyone know if XP stores specific files right at the end for some reason??

I have used diskkepper, which shows me that the files are not the page file, and i hvae also turned off system restore to no avail.

If anyone can throw me some advice or anything to help i will be a happy man...

Use a non-microsoft defrag program.

I had a similar problem, and using Norton Utilities still could not find out exactly which files were sitting near the end of my partition. But with NU you can at least say which files should come last on a given partition. So I made an image file from an almost full CD-ROM and made copies of that until I had as many 700 MB images as I needed to fill the space I wanted to free. Then I let NU defragment the drive, setting its options so that the image files were put right after all other file types. After defragmentation I deleted the image files and then I could resize the partition as needed.

Robin

Thanks Caeda, i simply downloaded System Mechanic from download.com - and used the defragmenter from that, and it moved those annoying files right back to that start of the partition. There was still some system files which did not move, but this was not expected anyway.

So now i got 18 GB to use with linux, instead of a mere 8.

thanks again! such a simple solution eh?

thanks for ur input as well bitpicker, but i dont have NU on my system anyway..