At the preliminary meeting for the install fest repartitioning ntfs disk partitions was discussed.
I have just reinstalled Windows 2000 so decided to test the ntfsresize utility. I have good news and bad news; The good news: It works The bad news: It takes an awfully long time, and the maintainer has just issued a critical warning against using it with 2.6 kernel based distributions. The computer: A dell with a 600 MHz processor, 128 Mb ram, 10Gb hard disk, with a 5Gb ntfs primary partition. The operating system is Windows 2000 Pro SP3. It was a completely new install with no software other than the OS loaded. The disk was defragmented immediately after 1st boot. Method: The computer was booted with a Toms Root & Boot floppy. I used the ntfsresize saticly linked binary on a floppy. I ran the program with the --info argument which checked the partition and made repartitioning suggestions, followed by running the --no-action argument to test, followed by the resizing operation for real The application reported that 832Mb of a 5Gb partition was used and would shift 232 Mb to reduce a 5Gb partition to 2Gb. This operation took 3 hours to complete. fdisk was then used to delete the old ntfs partition and create a new smaller one. Conclusions: The time taken to complete this operation will cause serious time delay problems at the install fest. The maintainer reports that a combination of certain bios settings, 2.6 kernel, and some disk partitioning program's can make Windows operating systems unbootable. Problems have been reported with Mandrake 10, SUSE 9.1 and Fedora 2 distos. If we are to offer disk repartitioning at the install fest we have further investigations to make ntfsreze home page; http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html Cheers Ross Drummond
