[vox-tech] Mini Howto: resize NTFS with PQDisk (from v1.0 Xandros CDs)

[Mike Simons]

On Sun, Mar 21, 2004 at 10:17:15PM -0800, Rod Roark wrote:
> > v1.0 Xandros CDs come with a problem called PQDisk, which can be used to
> > resize NTFS partitions among others types.
> 
> There's a program called QTParted which also does this, and comes with
> Knoppix and some other distributions.  It uses the ntfsresize utility,
> which in turn is part of the ntfsprogs package.

Rod,

  Good point I should have mentioned ntfsresize...


To explain why I bothered write this up... why not use ntfsresize?

With the PQDisk program no defrag is required, it moves the data blocks
while resizing partitions. 

The last few times I tried to use ntfsresize, it reported that blocks were
in use at the end of the partition and could only shrink the partition
by a few K.

Modern disk "defrag" windows programs don't actually move all data from
the end of disk area... so after doing a few unproductive defrag then 
ntfsresize cycles I looked for something else.


This was before ntfsresize supported moving of data blocks ...

After checking the ntfsutils website I see that now the latest ntfsresize 
1.9.0, which came out Mar 12th, added support for moving of data blocks 
so defrag is not required.  Provided it works that is a better way to 
go than this PQDisk thing.  I'll test it out next time I encounter NTFS.

The ntfsresize FAQ is here:
  http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html