[Bug 77302] ntfsresize cannot shrink XP without leaving ~300MB of wasted disk; gparted unhelpful.

[RichardNeill]

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When installing (Edgy/Ubuntu), I wanted to shrink my XP partition to the smallest possible size. The minimum apparent partition size was 8GB, but if I selected this, ntfsresize would fail. I don't recall that gparted gave any sort of helpful error message. In fact, you need to leave about 300MB more space than you think, and 
everything is happy. This isn't really a bug in ntfsresize, more that the installer should explain the need for leaving XP some headroom.

[Incidentally, the machine is a new thinkpad, which has only ever booted WinXP about 10 times, and on which I have installed nothing. IBM shipped a few trivial
utilities (acroread, dvdplayer, antivirus). 8GB is rather bloated ;-) ]

** Affects: gparted (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: Confirmed

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ntfsresize cannot shrink XP without leaving ~300MB of wasted disk; gparted unhelpful. 
https://beta.launchpad.net/bugs/77302