Shrink Windows partition to permit a UBUNTU partition

[Nigel Henry]

On Monday 18 August 2008 18:19, Nils Kassube wrote:
> Mark Haney wrote:
> > You want to defragment the partition in such as way as to make all the
> > data be toward the front of the partition (logically speaking) if you
> > plan on shrinking the partition from the back.  The standard windows
> > defragmenter is perfect for this.
>
> Actually that is what I wanted to do, but the Windows XP defragmenter
> doesn't have the option to move everything towards the front of the
> partition. That may be different for other versions of Windows, but with
> Windows XP it isn't possible.
>
>
> Nils

I found that on the original harddrive that came with XP on it. I defragged 
it, but viewing the post defrag, there was a whole bunch of stuff at the 
start of the drive, then a lot of blank space, then more stuff, apparently 
unmoveable files. My XP is some 8+GB, so I used the Gparted live CD, and 
resized giving XP 12GB, which worked ok, and left me some 28GB of freespace, 
where I've been able to install a couple of distros that I wanted to try out. 
Kubuntu Dapper was the 1st, so installed Grub in the MBR. Dapper booted ok, 
so did XP. In fact XP was booting better going through the chainloader in 
Grub, than it done before (often ending up in a reboot cycle). Installed FC5 
next (you can see how long ago I did this), put Grub in the / partition of 
FC5, rebooted into Dapper, and added a chainloader in /boot/grub/grub.conf, 
pointing to the / partition of FC5, all 3 OS's boot ok. Job done.

I must say I did not back up XP, as even though it has a bunch of music apps 
on it, I wasn't too bothered if the resize had gone pearshaped, and I'd lost 
XP to the bit bucket in the sky.

Nigel.