dannyman.toldme.com

Resize NTFS: Knoppix!

It took a few days of struggle, but ultimately I found a great way to shrink an NTFS partition on a notebook computer to make room for a Linux-Windows dual-boot.

Although I am trying out Fedora Core 4 . . . just to, you know, learn Red Hat? Well, if you download the Knoppix CD, you can boot into a KDE environment which makes available a vaguely intuitive point-and-click interface to ntfsresize called QTParted.

Details at: http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html#example

This blew the heck out of trying to use DOS-based freeware tools like “Partition Resizer” since the system had no floppy drive, and the apparently-useful “Ultimate Boot CD” . . . was not so useful.

Among the tricks with QTParted were:

• Telling Windows to run a full scan / fix of the disk.
• Expanding the “free space” instead of shrinking the partition size.
• Actually going to File > Commit to make things go.

But, now Fedora is installing . . . unless its sitting in the other room waiting for me to insert one of the other three CDs. Seriously, folks, I don’t see why an Operating System needs more than one CD to install . . .