[ltp] Broken ReiserFS / Method for shrinking and moving Windows partition

[Felix E. Klee]

On my T41 I shrank the preinstalled Windows partition with "ntfsresize"
made a backup using "ntfsclone", played back that backup, and finally
move the partition to the end of the disk using Acronis Disk Director
[1].  Also I created all LINUX partitions (three of them) using Acronis
Disk Director, and at a later point in time I shrank the Windows
partition again and added a Fat32 partition in the newly available free
space.

This I did because I wanted to put the Windows partitions at the end
of the disk which is the slowest one.

What I'm experiencing now are problems with one of my ReiserFS
partitions: Recently, "reisefsck --rebuild-tree" reported that the file 
system is damaged and it had to remove some entries in the file system 
table that were pointg to nowhere.  This is not good, and I wonder who 
is the culprit (/dev/hda6 is the part. with the damaged file system):

* Perhaps it's Acronis Disk Director.  It somehow doesn't seem to create
   a nice partition table.  Both, "cfdisk" and "sfdisk" choke on it [2].

* Perhaps it's Software Suspend 2: When I try to resume the system, I
   get error messages about a damaged file system and the resume process
   hangs.  This is what made me aware of the problem, and it did just
   reoccur, i.e. it looks like I have to fix /dev/hda6 again.  However,
   /dev/hda6 and /dev/hda2 (my swap part.) are *not* adajacent.  Also,
   at the moment even resuming from RAM doesn't work anymore: Here I get
   the same error messages as when trying to resume from disk.

* Perhaps it's ReiserFS itself who is to blame.  However, I do believe
    that version 3.6 should be fairly stable.

Hm...

Anyway, what I'd really like to know from this list - aside from
comments to my above observations - is:

* What methods are you using to shrink preinstalled Windows partitions
   on Thinkpads?

* Is it possible - using the recovery CDs for my T41 - to install
   Windows in space at the end of the disk?

[1] Replaying the backup was necessary because I had damaged the
   partition.

[2] This is the output I got when calling "sfdisk" and "cfdisk":

   > sfdisk /dev/hda

     Disk /dev/hda: 77520 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors/track
     Warning: The partition table looks like it was made
       for C/H/S=*/240/63 (instead of 77520/16/63).
     For this listing I'll assume that geometry.
     Units = cylinders of 7741440 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting
from 0

        Device Boot Start     End   #cyls    #blocks   Id  System
     /dev/hda1   *   3087    4469    1383   10455480    7  HPFS/NTFS
                     start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,239,63) found (1023,0,1)
     /dev/hda2          0+    271     272-   2056288+  82  Linux swap
     /dev/hda3        272    5167    4896   37013760    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
     /dev/hda4          0       -       0          0    0  Empty
     /dev/hda5        272+   2115    1844-  13940608+  83  Linux
     /dev/hda6       2116+   3086     971-   7340728+  83  Linux
                     start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,239,63) found (1023,1,1)
     /dev/hda7       4470+   5167     698-   5276848+   b  W95 FAT32
                     start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,239,63) found
(1023,1,1)

   > cfdisk /dev/hda
     FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 2:

     Press any key to exit cfdisk

-- 
Felix E. Klee