Hi,

I wanted to install Lycoris Linux on my computer, so I resized my windows partition in the program they provided. However, now I can't access windows. It shows the "windows logo" for about a sec, and it restarts! So, I undid the resize (deleted the linux partition, resized the windows partition to its regualr size) and it works. So I thought about using Mandrake's simple partition resize program, but it had some errors (something like it was corrupt). I can go on with windows, but I want to try Linux as well!

Thank you in advance

I know this won't directly solve your problem, but have you tried Knoppix? You won't have to bother with partitions and you can see what Linux is all about. That might help, unfortunately I can't help you too much with the partitioning, I just used Partition Magic.

I agree
If you use PM just for resizing your Windows partition, and not for formatting the newly freed-up space, Windows should be just fine. (I only say that because sometimes PM's "linux formatting", i.e. ext3, isn't the most reliable thing in the world; it crashed my computer quite nicely the one time I tried it.)

cool,
Laura

thanks guys for your reply

i've tried a couple of distros already (Mandrake and Red Hat)

i also got Partition Magic

My experience:
Got a computer with xp installed on a 20Gig drive, a few attempts to use some of the space to use Linux failed. The hard drive died after about a year and I replaced it with the smaller drive available, a 40Gig drive.

Really got frustrated that I was still unable to use some of the drive for Linux since I only need windows for satellite internet.

I tried the following solutions:
1) wipe off XP (home) and repartition the drive with Linux then reinstalled XP in a 8Gig partitions, this neatly repossessed the full drive and Linux was gone.

2)tried to resize the installed XP with Mandrake 9, despite some reports of
Mandrake able to shrink the XP partition I found no way of doing a resize
with it that would not wipe out XP.

3)reinstalled XP taking the full 40 Gig, I had Linux installed on a second, older drive (hdb) which is too small (3Gig) and too slow.

By then I had tried another few tricks that didn't work and I found that
the problem could be solved with "qtparted".

This is a Linux program and therefore you need a second drive for it to work since XP takes the full drive regardless of what you do. But an older drive or any drive you can borrow will do.

I installed "qtparted" on the Linux drive, ran it and there it is, it took a few minutes to read the screen and understand the options and 1 second to cut xp down to size. I rebooted windows XP and it worked fine except for a minor unexpected result, the XP resolution was changed (easy fixed).

I've read a few posts of people having the same problem and having to contemplate purchasing proprietary partition manager which is only a bit cheaper than buying a second drive anyway.

Enter the keyword "qtparted" in your search engine and you will get a fair
bit of info, reviews and download sources and not much unwanted stuff.

Hope this can help.

My experience (part 2, the details)
(this is only valid if your XP is installed on hda2, adjust if required, hda1 is the hidden diagnostic partition which is left completely untouched)

-download "qtparted" (the version containing "ntfsprogs...")
-this is an RPM that will install in /usr/sbin
-from there run "./ntfsresize" for info or
"./ntfsresize -i /dev/hda2" this will calculate minimum hda2 partition size
-make a note of the result
-then run "./ntfsresize -s xxG /dev/hda2" this will resize the XP partition (xxG should not be smaller than the resulting size from previous step)
-we're then presented the option to "commit" which really makes the
changes
-here we can disconnect and remove our second drive
-reboot XP, windows will detect the changes and run a disk check and will
then reboot
-check it up till we're satisfied everything's OK (cdrive - properties etc)
-here I found I had to locate a version of linux that uses the old linux fdisk,
RedHat9 doesn't, so I used RedHat8
-reboot from the RH8 install disk untill we get to the fdisk partitionning step
-delete hda2 which is the last partition on the drive
-create new partition starting exactly at the same location than the deleted one (yes this is our XP partition)
-make sure to allocate an "end" so that the new partition is not smaller than the size we've taken note earlier
-make sure the type is NTFS (7)
-make sure it is bootable (a)
-from then on, define the other partitions we want for linux, when we finished write changes to disk (w)
-press the back button untill we're back to the beginning of the install
-remove our installation medium
-insert the RedHat 9 cd and install from there
-reboot a few times in both Linux and XP, everything is fine, both are now on the same drive.

The same could probably be achieved without a second drive if you manage
to have linux on a floppy with "qtparted" installed on the floppy or if you manage to build a cd.

Boot with the Windows CD and select the recovery console, at the command prompt type "fixmbr" to repair the master boot record. This should allow you to reboot into windows. I installed Mandrake 10 and it resized NTFS and installed fine and both OS's work.