There are several things you can try. First of all have you played with the cheat codes. Before you do this try booting into runlevl 3. To do this type 'knoppix init 3' at the boot screen. This will get you into text/full network mode. Hopefully your machine won't crash at this point. Now issue this command: 'dmesg |more' This should give you the output of the bootup process up till that point. You may not know what everything means, but look for red flags - error messages. You can post back here about it. Apart from any visible error message in dmesg, play around with the cheat code options.

Regarding NTFS resizing, I think I may have some good news to people who are trying to do this without buying Partition Magic. The new Mandrake is supposed to be able to resize NTFS partitions. You can try downloading the first CD and using the installer to do the resizing of your NTFS partition. As always - BACK UP YOUR STUFF FIRST!!!!

Mandrake 9.1 isn't finished yet, but you can download the latest testing version here. As far as I know, the installer SHOULD work. Again, people who want to try this are doing it at their own risk, but the outlook is good that it will work. Hopefully the upcoming Debian installer will do this too.