partition magic tool

[James McDonald]

Vu Pham wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-05-05 at 07:10 -0700, Ken Moffat wrote:
>   
>> Ronnie Gauthier wrote:
>>     
>
>   
>> gparted in included on many recent live cd's as well.
>>
>>     
>
> Ken, Ronnie, Tim, thanks for your reply. Yes, I found gparted in the
> Ubuntu CD. After booting from that CD, I can run gparted and it shows me
> the device/parttitions and allows me to select the partition to resize.
>
> The problem is when I select "apply" it started for some 10 seconds then
> reported that the operation failed and told me to check the error
> detail. But in the Error Detail, there is nothing but the message
> "Resize the partition /dev/sda2 to .... Mb".
>
> Any comments ?
>
>   
I recently shrank my XP laptops partition to allow installation of Ubuntu.

Using ntfsresize and fdisk worked fine. Something similar to the error 
you are getting above happened to me the first time I ran ntfsresize 
because although it suggest I could shrink it to Xmb when I ran it with 
the -n (not really) option it couldn't actually do it in real life. I 
added about 2 GB to the amount it suggested (you get the suggested size 
by running ntfsresize --info /dev/hdaX) and it was fine.
Here are my "as it happened" notes
http://www.jamesmcdonald.id.au/files/faqs/mine/shrinkingNTFStoInstallLinux/shrinkingNTFStoInstallLinux.txt

I presume gparted etc are actually doing it all for you so it's probably 
better / easier to use that.