Thanks for that hint, Facteur - I'm trapped with XP Home myself, and I've started removing stuff, too ... but here's a strange thing that happened to me over my (offline) weekend: desperate as I was, I thought I'd look at the partitioning features offered by my WinXP recovery cd. Put it in, booted up, looked around, did *nothing*. Booted up in XP again, and by M$ magic, my MFT had actually been moved right behind the file blocks! (Well, not quite right behind, but a fair bit "north" on the drive map.)

But TANSTAAFL - now my pagefile was behind the MFT again, way at the bottom on the drive map. Since it wasn't defragmented but in one solid block, I didn't think I'd get Diskeeper to move it (even though it does have the boot time defrag option for XP Home as well, only it's a bit hidden - "Change your settings", then "Set a boot time defragmentation" in Version 6).

So I fiddled around some more, to no avail - then I did the XP recovery boot thing again, and hey presto! The pagefile was moved ahead of the MFT. But *still*, qtparted refuses to resize the partition - it tells me that the drive is fragmented and I need to resize it to about 0,3 GB short of the total. On the shell, it says "Error: ms dos disk labels do not support partition names" - does that mean anything? The qtparted FAQ isn't much help on that issue ("I know, I'm working on it").

Now I think we're both nearing that threshold of desperation/frustration/courage where we decide to just wipe the hd, repartition the whole thing and (re-)install both XP and Knoppix. Before that happens, I'll wait around for any news from you, Facteur (or anyone with suggestions).

Best regards,

Florian.