Installing Ubuntu

[Nils Kassube]

David Vincent wrote:
> Nils Kassube wrote:
> > Some months ago I followed that procedure on 2 Windows XP machines
> > and on both the Windows partition was damaged without hope for
> > Windows to recover. Of course it was damaged by resizing the
> > partition with gparted afterwards, not due to defragmenting. When
> > that happened, I did some research and found a forum entry somewhere
> > which claimed that you should NOT defragment an NTFS partition before
> > installing Linux (sorry, can't find that entry right now). As I did
> > not yet try without defragmenting, I don't know if that would work
> > any better (there are not many Windows machines around to play with
> > :) but I do know that defragmenting doesn't prevent data loss.
>
> i would love to read that forum entry.

I was a bit wrong in so far as it was not a forum entry - but here it is: 
<http://en.opensuse.org/Access_Your_Windows_Files#Preparing_Installation_by_Hand>

> i've resized hundreds of disks 
> with all the tools available (gparted, qtparted, partition magic and
> more though generally pm or gparted) and almost always defragmented
> them before doing so.  i've never had a problem unless there was a
> hardware issue with the drive (sometimes resizing the partition brings
> out those issues) or a power issue during the process.  defragmenting
> the drive (if you are shrinking it) will save you time during the
> shrink process.

There is no reason for me to doubt your statement - I have done that also 
without problem on some machines. I just say it is not really reliable. 
On the machines where shrinking the ntfs partition with gparted failed, 
there was no power or hardware failure.