[ltp] resizing hard disk on ThinkPad T40?

[Szakacsits Szabolcs]

On Mon, 23 Feb 2004, Annika Wille wrote:

> I tried to install Mandrake Linux 9.2 on my ThinkPad T40. It has a 40GB
> NTFS hard drive. First I checked the hard disk, then I ran defrag. But
> even though, that I have 14GB free space on my drive, I cannot resize it
> sufficiently enough within the Mandrake installation process. The reason
> might be that IBM put the Windows recovering system on a part of the
> disk.
> 
> So, my questions are:
> - Can I resize my hard disk more, without loosing my Windows?
> - If yes, how?

Well, one way to do it is using ntfsresize 1.9-BETA from

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

Quite a lot of people used it over the last 3 months and nobody reported
or had problems. It's the same what Mandrake 9.2 uses but it's also
capable to move around anything without any risk (minus power outage or
hitting the power off or reset button during NTFS resizing).

The drawback is that you have to do the fdisk part manually and that's
quite scary and error-prone for newbies ....... well, here is a trick to
avoid fdisk if you brave enough. This _should_ work if DiskDrake in
Mandrake 9.2 doesn't have a bug.

	boot a Linux Live CD with networking support (e.g. Knoppix) and
               download the statically linked ntfsresize 1.9-BETA
        tar xzvf ntfsresize-static-<suffix>.tgz
        cd ntfsresize-static-<suffix-here>
	./ntfsresize --info partition
	./ntfsresize --no-action --size <SIZE_YOU_WANT> partition
	./ntfsresize --size <SIZE_YOU_WANT> partition 
	start Mandrake 9.2 install, you should be able to resize now but
              you must do it at minimum <SIZE_YOU_WANT>.

However I would still do a backup because no protection for power outage
and potential DiskDrake bugs (there isn't anything I'm aware of).

Cheers,
	Szaka