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.