XP Block: Sys files in the way.

[Facteur]

Readers, it's possible that the above diagram is incorrect. In terms of LILO, I experimented after I learnt that you can easily recover the old windows mbt settings using FDISK /MBR or FIXMBR. It's actually not such a big deal.
***End of topic***

[Fisslefink]

There is a surprising lack of information on the web concerning moving NTFS MFT and System files to the front of the drive. I had this same goal so that I could install a Yoper (linux distro) installation on my WinXP drive, but the Knoppix.net forums were the most helpful.

Sorry to resurrect a dead thread, but I hope that my experience will help those in the future:

Steps:

1) Booted from the "Ultimate Boot CD 4 Windows" (www.ubcd4win.com) and ran the following from the command prompt:

D:\programs\dirms\dirms.exe c move lcn

(where c is the drive letter of my NTFS WinXP drive) This is an excellent defragging utility and compresses everything to the front of the drive EXCEPT MFT files. This alone gained me 4.66Gb of my 120Gb drive in Qtparted.

2) Used VoptXP (trialware) in WinXP to view the status of the drive. It shows the last used block on the drive much more visibly than Diskeeper or WinXP's defragger.

3) Used professional version (trialware) of Executive Software Diskeeper to "Set a boot-time defragmentation" with the following settings ON:

Schedule time: On next manual reboot
Put all folders together on the volume
Run CHKDSK before defragmentation
Defragment the paging file
Defragment the Master File Table (MFT)

4) Rebooted, CHKDSK ran once, rebooted automatically, Diskeeper ran for about 10 minutes, booted into Windows.

5) Ran VoptXP to see the improvement ... WHOA! Instead of 4Gb, I now have 44Gb free at the tail end of the drive (and only 53Gb free, so that's very compacted!!!)

6) Booted into Knoppix 3.6 and used Qtparted to resize the partition as I pleased.

7) Booted into Windows, ran CHKDSK just in case.

Voila! Two partitions!!!

Hope this helps someone!

[Irgu]

Alternatively you could use Knoppix 3.7 or later. These releases include a much improved ntfsresize version (what qtparted, gparted, diskdrake, yast, evms and so on use to resize NTFS) that can move around anything without data loss. Actually it's pretty old, Knoppix has just forgotten to update it for over year: http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/ntfsresize.html