Shrinking the Windows partition
 

Do you know if there is any open source or free software that can shrink the Windows partition?

Thanks in advance. :D

The SuSE installer comes with a tool, that can resize any kind (or almost) of partitions.
Unfortunately I do not know what tool this is...

just my 2 cents

To resize a windows partition, you will have to go through several steps. First, you will need dynamic disks (windows 2000 and newer). In a dynamic disk you an resize the file system and the partition. I will not give those instructions here, as they are specific to winders. The Linux NTFS tools are not "stable" yet and I wouldnt trust them. resizing an NTFS file system in Linux would be risky in my opinion.

ntfsresize will safely resize an NTFS partition. You need to defrag it first, then do not attempt to make the partition smaller than the location of the last piece of data that is on it.

I was able to resize an NTFS partition successfully by turning off the swap file in Windows and repeatedly defraging the partition until there were no files after the point I wanted to the split the drive at. Then I just put in the Mandrake 10.1 CD and it resized the partition in the installation menu. I suppose that is the easiest way to do it.

trainee: free, open source tools to repartition Windows (both FAT and NTFS): QTParted, GParted, Mandriva's DiskDrake, IBM's EVMS, Novell/SUSE YAST, Debian's/Ubuntu's Partman, Parted (FAT), ntfsresize + fdisk/cfdisk (NTFS). Btw, all previous tools use ntfsresize and parted internally. Probably I missed some. Sorry about it :)

Geronimo: SUSE uses Parted for FAT resizing and repartitioning, and ntfsresize for NTFS resizing.

jhumeston: dynamic disks are for only dedicated Windows use, no other OS can be installed. Also one can only expand the volume in some limited case (not boot, not system volume, etc). You are wrong about the Linux NTFS tools as well. The NTFS resizer is stable and it always was since its original release, three years ago: http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/....html#reliable
http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/status.html

jiml8: ntfsresize doesn't require defragmentation since the end of 2003. This is documented in several places:
http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html (see the first sentence)
http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/man/ntfsresize.html (see the 3rd sentence in the 'Description' chapter)
Of course you can also make the partition smaller than the location of the last piece of data because ntfsresize will relocate these data safely if needed.

juanbobo: I don't remember what ntfsresize version Mandrake 10.1 used but built-in "defragmentation" support is available only since ntfsresize version 1.9.0 (end of 2003):
http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/...tml#fragmented
But I do know that Mandriva (10.2) doesn't require defragmentation and turning off pagefile to be able to safely resize NTFS, though its manual wasn't updated to reflect this fact.

when in the 2.6 kernel the support for ntfs (write) is "experamental" I would say that its not stable...

ntfsresize doesn't rely on the NTFS-Kernelfunctions.

http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/...ze.html#driver

As [|RoA|]RoadRunner wrote, ntfsresize doesn't use the kernel driver at all. This is also explained additionally here (also see the URL what [|RoA|]RoadRunner wrote): http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/...ize.html#write

Moreover the write support in kernel 2.6 isn't experimental. You confuse that with the previous NT4 write support in a completely different NTFS driver, not used in 2.6. The NTFS driver in 2.6 can only overwrite files, nothing else. That is safe. No other write functionality implemented yet, thus there isn't any way to destroy any data currently.