Resizing with gparted for Fedora installation

[Mauriat]

On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 9:17 AM, Mark Ryden <markryde at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>  I have a new Lenovo laptop with Windows Vista on it. I want to install Linux
> on it while keeping vista on it (though I rarely intend to use Vista,
> keeping vista is a MUST for me). So I want it to be dual boot. There is
> one partition on the disk, with 160GB. I consider using gparted livecd for it.
> In fact, I did not used the
> There is a way to Windows Vista except booting once into the system, so most of
> the disk is free.
> I know how to use the resize feature of gparted. I intend to resize
> the partition
> to 20 GB and then create a new parition in the free space which will be
> created. On the new paritition I intend to install the Linux.
> My questions are:
> 1) Is it safe to do resizing with gparted ?
> 2) I saw in the web in some post :
> run:
> #ntfsfix -V
> and then:
> if you don't see version 2 don't use this version of gparted on Vista
> NTFS volumes
>
> 3) This can be done also by ntfsresize, thus:
> ntfsresize -s 20G /dev/sda1
>
> Is ntfsresize -s 20G any better ? safer? or is it in fact the same
> (but not from
> the GUI)?
>
> Regards,
> Mark Ryden

I bought a Lenovo laptop with Windows Vista on it.  I used gparted
livecd to resize it.  In my case, there was a ~5GB recovery partition
before Vista.  The gparted resize of NTFS took an incredibly long time
(45 minutes or more, can't recall), but it worked without any
problems.  Vista will need to run a check on boot, but that did not
have any issues either.  I have done this now twice with the liveccd
without any problems.

If I were you I would recommend leaving the space you resize
completely empty and let the next Linux/Fedora installer partition it
for you.

Added point: In my case, I found leaving Vista only 20GB completely
unusable (I've since bought a new drive, and gave it at least 30GB
now).

-Mauriat