[ltp] pre-installation advice?

[Szakacsits Szabolcs]

On Fri, 25 Jun 2004, Tim Prince wrote:

> If you're using ntfsresize, as supplied by SuSE, there's an advantage in 
> doing it before files start to clutter up the space beyond the directory 
> and system files.  No need to do it before running XP, but ntfsresize, as I 
> understand it, can only shrink it by the empty space at the end of the 
> partition.  

Ntfsresize 1.9 and up can relocate any files safely (for a reference, I
wrote it but please see the man page for details). Suse 9.1 uses one of
these thus it can shrink NTFS partition without defrag and other tricks
(without turning off page file, hibernation, etc).

However as most other distros, SUSE also uses Parted (used for the
partition table manipulation) and 2.6 kernel and they don't always work
nicely together. There are situations when Parted 

	1) makes Windows unbootable

	2) shifts the start of partitions (so your filesystem is gone)

Both are recoverable and happen only rarely (not always). This issue is
filesystem and distro independent. It happened on Mandrake, Fedora,
Debian, Gentoo, Knoppix, SystemRescueCD, etc, NTFS, FAT32, etc.

Most vendor provided fix for case 1) but not for case 2). Parted fix is on
the way.

The most reliable way I'm aware currently to resize an NTFS is 
ntfsresize + fdisk. Kernel could be any.

	Szaka