David @ Tokyo

Well, that all went like a ... whatever it they say something and a babies bottom. I forgot. It happens when you speak Japanese 75% of the day.

ntfsresize successfully shrunk my Windows XP C: from 29GB down to 22GB. Rather than use the GUI interface, the command line interface approach seemed like a more reassuring way of going about the task thanks to the very clear example .

In fact, I found that I could improve on the example a bit too. When recreating the partition for the shrunken NTFS, it recommends using the new NTFS size + the theoretical maximum cylinder size, because the partition creation program can round down the partition size to align it on a cylinder boundary.

So I did this when I used fdisk the first time around, specifying the size of the new partition as 22140Megabytes (the example says that 140M is the max theoretical cylinder size). But when I ran "ntfsresize --force --info /dev/hda1", the output indicated that rather than rounding down, the value had been rounded up so that the partition was actually 22160 Megabytes.

That's 160 Megabytes I want for my new Linux installation thankyou very much!!

So I repartioned again, instead using 22010M as the size of the partition. And sure enough, when I checked the output of "ntfsresize -fi /dev/hda1", the partition size had been rounded up to 22020M.

One exercise that I will do later: I've now rebooted successfully back into Windows, but note that my new NTFS size was only 22000M. The partition size is apparently 22020M - so I'm wasting 20Megabytes. Okay okay, big deal, sure, but after carving 7GB off my Windows partition suddenly it seems like every byte counts! Confident now that this ntfsresize tool knows what it is doing, I'll run it again, but this time to enlarge my file system to fill out those extra 20 Megabytes. That's at least 4 mp3s I can fit on there!!!

Thanks also to Knoppix for including this great free repartitioning software on the Live CD, and also further thanks to Google's Gmail. I just got invited to set up an account the other day. I used my Gmail account while logged into the stateless Knoppix to post various backup files to myself - just in case! As it turned out I didn't need them yet, but who knows, maybe my Linux installation will eat my MBR, then I will be thankful!