Quote Originally Posted by Facteur
I used ntfsresize and cfdisk to resize XP Pro on my 450MHzP3 with 6G HD, and create new partitions for Linux.

I didn't use qtparted because, I thought it was poor, although nice to look at.
Fdisk gave me wild info about my HD, saying that it already had four partitions (hda1p1, hda1p2, hda1p3 and hda1p4). Cfdisk appeared the most serious of the tools.

I followed all the available instructions and everything was went fairly smoothly, except when I tried to boot back in XPPro under the newly partitioned HD. The splash screen holds for about a second and then I get a blue screen of death with error type "unmountable_boot_volume". After that, I feared the worst. But I was able to see my original NTFS volume with Knoppix OK and even read some of the files.
Unfortunately cfdisk is the worst choise. Apparently it rounds down to cylinder boundary opposed to fdisk and QTParted thus you made the end of your partition in the middle of your NTFS filesystem. You can confirm this if you run 'ntfsresize -fi partition', ntfsresize will complain (I managed to do this once before). I just recreated the partition to be bigger and everything worked fine.

Other possibilities are you did't set the partition type to 7 or missed the set the partition's bootable.

Also if your partition wasn't /dev/hda1 then it might be renumbered and NTLDR can't find the right partition because BOOT.INI has the old value. This is also fixable.

QTParted takes care about these annoying details thus why I prefer using it