Partitioning problems

[Andrew Stephenson <andrew_stephenson optusnet com au>]

Hi there,

I have two hard drives, a 40 and 60 gig, respectively having windows XP
pro and red hat linux 9.  The 40 gig is hda and 60 is hdb, and I'm
having trouble with parted - I want to shrink my root partition for
linux (EXT3) to make a fat32 partition writable by redhat an XP.

For Example (using parted 1.6.5):

Using /dev/hdb
Information: The operating system thinks the geometry on /dev/hdb is
7297/255/63.  Therefore, cylinder 1024 ends at 8032.499M.
(parted) print
Disk geometry for /dev/hdb: 0.000-57241.898 megabytes
Disk label type: msdos
Minor    Start       End     Type      Filesystem  Flags
1          0.031    101.975  primary   ext3        boot
2        101.975  56219.655  primary   ext3
3      56219.656  57239.406  primary   linux-swap

then when I try and shrink /dev/hdb2 ....

(parted) resize 2 101.9751 50000
No implementation: this ext2 filesystem has a rather strange layout!
Parted can't resize this (yet)

Can anyone help me?

Thanks in advance,

andy