[Novalug] Asking for help saturday at NOVALUG to use Linux CentOS to partition XP laptop to load Linux

[Angelo Bertolli]

Stuart D. Gathman wrote:
> On Thu, 1 Feb 2007, James (Jim) Darlack wrote:
>
>> The other day, a friend gave me CentOS, and I began to install it. I 
>> got up
>> to the point of where it gives the option to create and adjust 
>> partitions.
>> Frankly, I chickened out! Why? I dont want to lose the XP and XP apps 
>> that
>> are installed on the drive.
>
> There is some risk to open source tools that attempt to resize NTFS. This
> is because NTFS is an undocumented format (FAT partitions are safer to
> manipulate with Linux). If your NTFS partition is really important, I
> recommend you buy a second hard drive to put Linux stuff on. Get an 
> OEM drive
> at MicroCenter - they are cheap (both 3 1/2 and laptop drives sold). 
Of course you should always make a backup. But ntfsresize is *very* 
reliable. So reliable in fact, that I don't often make backups when 
using it through gparted. But of course you should!

"Since July of 2002, when ntfsresize became publicly available, there 
were countless success reports for both enlarging and shrinking Windows 
XP/2000/NT4, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista NTFS filesystems on 
both workstation and server versions (Home, Professional, Server, 
Advanced Server). No destroyed filesystem was reported who followed the 
instructions correctly."

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

Angelo