Trying to Resize Windows Filesystem for Knoppix/DEB Install

[rossi]

Hello:

I am trying to use the Knoppix 3.9 CD to resize a 360 GB drive of Dell P4 Dual Processor Machine.

The Knoppix CD works fine and finds all devices. It works!

But when I use QTPARTED or fdisk or cfdisk, the hard drive cannot be found. They all show nothing, no partitions, nothing.

One message I get from fdisk is "you will not be able to write to the partition table. sector size is 2048 (not 512). device contains neither valid partition table nor Sun, SGI, or OSF.

This isn't Knoppix' fault. But, what is happening here. This is a brand new machine, and windows is running on the partition. But nothing shows up with the Knoppix CD.

Please help me find a workaround.

Regards,

Angelo

[UnderScore]

Practically all of the time the first IDE HD is hda. These days with SATA IDE chipsets & drives, the first drive may be sda.

The results of this command should indicate how the HD is identified by the kernel:
dmesg | grep -i hd
and
dmesg | grep -i ide. I have a feeling that the fdisk programs & qtparted only search for devices under /dev/hd and not /dev/sd.

[rossi]

Hello:

This was an excellent suggestion. It is an sda hard drive.

Can you help me to resize this hard drive in order to install knoppix? Here is the information after using cfdisk /dev/sda:

sda1 primary Dell Utility 49.46 (MB)
sda2 boot primary NTFS 396548.98 (MB)
sda3 promary CP/M/CTOS 3487.52(MB)

I want to resize /dev/sda2 and use the freed space to create a partition for installing Knoppix/Debian.

I DO NOT WANT to delete sda1 sda3 because, I think that Windows startup will look for these partitions. Something similar is on the IBM ThinkPads, and I ran into trouble when I deleted a partition like sda3.

Can you give guidance? What will the new partition be called ... sda4 ... than gives me the limit I can have. Please give me some advice on this.

Kind regards,

Angelo

[UnderScore]

I DO NOT WANT to delete sda1 sda3 because, I think that Windows startup will look for these partitions. Something similar is on the IBM ThinkPads, and I ran into trouble when I deleted a partition like sda3.I know it is possible to shrink NTFS partitions.

Whenever NTFS resizing is mentioned & since I don't know the skill level of people reading my words, I tend to follow through with a warning.
WARNING! There is ALWAYS some risk of losing data. Please ALWAYS make sure that you have a working backup of your important data prior to experimenting with ANY new software, no matter if Windows, Linux or anything else.

So you have this:

----------------------------------------------------
| sda1 primary Dell Utility 49.46 (MB) |
|--------------------------------------------------|
| sda2 boot primary NTFS 396548.98 (MB) |
|--------------------------------------------------|
| sda3 primary CP/M/CTOS 3487.52(MB) |
|--------------------------------------------------|
And you want something like this:

----------------------------------------------------
| sda1 primary Dell Utility 49.46 (MB) |
|--------------------------------------------------|
| sda2 boot primary NTFS 286548.98 (MB) |
|--------------------------------------------------|
| sda3 primary CP/M/CTOS 3487.52(MB) |
|--------------------------------------------------|
| sda5 primary Linux ext3fs 10240(MB) |
|--------------------------------------------------|
| sda6 primary Linux swap 1024(MB) |
|--------------------------------------------------|

It should be possible to shrink a NTFS partition in the middle of a drive that is sandwiched by two other partitions. I do not know if it is possible to then take the free space in the middle of a drive and then create partitions from it at the end of a drive. Since a drive lays its partitions down in a line (linearlly), this would require a couple steps.

- shrink ntfs partition.
- move (effectivly expand & then shrink) the sda3 partition across the freed space until it meets the boundry of the NTFS partition.
- then create Linux partitions in the freed space

Maybe linu/knoppix can do it. I don't know. The only thing I can suggest is to perhaps experiment on another drive & see if it works. Or investigate third party partitioning software like Partition Magic.
I wish you success.
James