[ltp] resizing hard disk on ThinkPad T40?

[Szakacsits Szabolcs]

On Tue, 24 Feb 2004, Moritz Heiber wrote:

> Another approach would be:
> 
> http://www.sysresccd.org
> 
> Its shipping with many common tools like parted, partimage, mkfs and
> among them qt_parted. 

This will not work for the same reason as the Mandrake 9.2 install.
The explanation is here (please note, Mandrake, SUSE, QTParted, etc all
use the same open source ntfs resizer I wrote 1.5+ years ago):

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

I tried to contact QTParted author several times how to add support
for the improved NTFS resizer and it could have been added to sysresccd
but unfortunately he never answered (very busy in life).

Although I've never used or even really seen commercial defragmenter and
partition resizers in my life, a lot of people shared their NTFS
experiences with me during the last 1.5 year when they asked about or
commented in connection with ntfsresize. I try to quickly summarize them
here, maybe it will be useful for others also.

NTFS defragmenters:

	- Apparently O&O does the best job usually moving things to the
          partition start.

        - repeatedly using the built-in W2K/XP/W2K3 defragmenter MIGHT
          help, but usually not much

        - at large, NTFS defragmenters only defragment, they don't move 
          (all the) data towards the partition start. This is in contrast
          with what people get used to on Win9x, etc using FAT. The only
          exception seems to be O&O (I've never checked if this is true,
          instead I added support for ntfsresize to be able to move around
          anything safely that's needed to resize NTFS without data loss).

        - turning off Windows virtual memory, hibernation, system recovery
          MIGHT help drastically. These are irrelevant if one uses the 
          latest ntfsresize beta, just like the need of any defragmenter.

        - in general, the shrinkage limit was around half of the partition
          because NTFS places there some metadata by definition and no 
          defragmenter will move it away. However this is not a rule, it
          might depend on how the vendor images the computers.


Commercial NTFS partitioners:

        - Far the most problems and destroyed NTFS with Partition Magic.
          The problems also include when users couldn't get it run at all.
          I don't know the reason why PM fails so often. Is it user mistake? 
          Using too old, buggy versions? It still just has bugs? Users 
          ignore/disable consistency check before resizing? AFAIR, minimum
          8.01 is needed to try resizing an XP NTFS.

        - Partition Expert: very positive feedback. I remember only 2 cases 
          when people reported data loss.

        - BootItNG: many positive feedbacks, zero destroyed NTFS.

    Szaka