GParted won't resize a FAT32 partition.

[Neil Woolford]

I have an elderly Dell laptop with a 20MB hard drive.  The drive was originally
one large Windows 98 FAT32 partition.

Over the last few years I have installed various Linuxes in a second, EXT3
partition on the same drive.  I now have a bootable FAT32 of around 16MB 
containing Windows 98 and a 4GB partition with Ubuntu Dapper Drake on the one
drive (plus a small swap partition of course).  I wish to move over to using
Dapper on a daily basis, so want to give it a little more room at the expense of
Windows, which I am phasing out.  There is around 3GB unused within the Windows
(FAT32) partition.

My attempts to use GParted to shrink this partition have failed.  If the FAT32
partition is not mounted, GParted warns me that it cannot read it, but would
allow me to resize it down by about 7MB, which is not worth doing.  If I mount
the partition, the correct information about free space within it becomes
available, but of course GParted won't resize a mounted partition.

This happens using GParted both from within the Dapper installation and from the
Dapper Live CD.

Where am I going wrong?

Neil

PS  I can't get the GParted live CD to work at all on this particular laptop,
due to a firmware bug with DMA.  The Dapper live CD has to be started with
ide=nodma as a parameter to work, I don't seem to be able to pass this to
GParted's live CD.