NTFS and Linux

[Teodor Iliescu]

On Tue, 14 Oct 2003, Jim Skehill wrote:

> As I see it I have 4 options:
> 1) Buy Partition Magic.
> 2) Blow away the existing install of XP, repartition the hard drive, install
> Linux, reinstall XP, etc.
> 3) Go to a Linux Install Fest. (Does anybody know if one is coming up in the
> Toronto area?)
> 4) Pay someone to repartition the hard drive and install Linux. (Who offers
> this service? How much does it cost?

Purchasing Partition Magic will do the trick, although it is too
expensive. I still don't know why computers are being shipped out with one
NTFS partition. I guess they don't want you to install or monkey around
with any other OS's. This makes it very inconvenient, if you want to ghost
your hard drive, save different data on a different partition, or install
a different OS as you are saying.

I have searched the web, and came across ntfsresize, an open source NTFS
re-sizer. It claims to resize NTFS partitions, which means you
can try it out on your system. They even mentioned compatibility with XP's
NTFS (5.1), and they said they had no destroyed filesystems:

Since July of 2002, when ntfsresize became publicly available, there were
countless success reports for both enlarging and shrinking Windows
XP/2000/NT4 and Windows Server 2003 NTFS filesystems on both workstation
and server versions (Home, Professional, Server, Advanced Server). No
destroyed filesystem was reported who followed the instructions correctly.
So yes, we think the code is reliable. However, just like in case of any
kind of partition and filesystem manipulation involved, we strongly
recommend to have a backup of your data. You have anyway, haven't you? We
did receive reports when commercial partitioners corrupted or destroyed
data when ntfsresize worked or refused to resize.

Source:
http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html

You can download the SystemRescueCD (71MB ISO), from
http://www.sysresccd.org/ which contains ntfsresizer. You do have a
burner, right?

Just make sure you backup any important data, just in case.
Hope this helps.

Teodor I.
http://penguincomputing.iwarp.com

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml