OK, I've used qtparted to resize the active windows partition in wierd cases similar to this.

My new computer science classroom/lab at school had 2 wimpdoze partitions on each of the 25 Dell PCs. In this case, however, hda2 was a FAT16 win95 rescue partition and hda1 was the active winXP FAT32 partiton. I simply used qtparted to resize the FAT32 partition from 40GB to 20GB. Then, from the freed up hdd space, I made hda3 an ext2 partition with about 19.5GB and and hda4 with 512MB for a linuxswap.

I thought I could something similar here, the only catch being the ntfs file format....

BTW, I haven't used any wimpdoze utilities in over 10 years now so I wouldn't know where to start with that. Like I tell my students: "I don't do windows! Its too messy, they don't pay me enough, I always leave streaks and suds...."

Anyway, personally I would do exactly as you say as I don't care one bit about the wimpdoze partition. However, my better half has to use winXP. Also, this is a brand new Dell under warranty with all these new bells and whistles for diagnosing problems remotely from the Dell online resource center, so I can't just kill what's in sda3/sda4....

If I simply resize sda2 could I create an sda5 partition for KNOPPIX or KANOTIX to boot from grub? Also, is it sda because its a SATA drive? What's special about SATA? Is there a problem with SATA and KNOPPIX I should know about?

Frustrated,
AJG