Hey. I just wanted to ask for your guys thoughts about a mistake I made. Ok here's what happened. I wanted to make space for a linux distribution on a system with one big NTFS partition, and so I booting my Knoppix Live CD. I had planned to use ntfsresize from www.ntfs-tools.org (I think). When I got into Knoppix (v4.0.2), I tried to use QTParted, which didn't seem to work (I would resize the Ntfs partition and after a while get a blank message box with only an ok button, and after I pressed Ok it returned to the original screen, having done nothing. I'm only guessing that this was an issue of needing to be root.

But then, I went to the command line (as root) to use ntfsresize manually. Everything seemed to go fine, but I was surprised when the utility told me I had to "delete" the original partition and "re-create" the partition with the new parameters. I decided, rather than use the "expert" fdisk, to use Qtparted to do this. I deleted the original partition in qtparted and recreated it with the new size...but it didn't work!!! All I got was a blank new partition! I messed around more than once with the cylinder, thinking that maybe I didn't have the correct starting cylinder, but I never got it. In the end, I had to take it into the shop in order to recover the data (my bad, that I didn't backup the data).

What went wrong? Was it that I used Qtparted, because it "automatically" formatted the partition when all I really wanted to do was to "update" the partition table to have the new end cylinder??? Should've I just used fdisk?? Any thoughts on what happened here? Was there an easier way to solve thiS than to take it into the shop???

Thanks