I just purchased a 3 year-old laptop (Dell Latitude D400) which has XP on it. I want to set up a dual boot with XP and Gutsy. I have a recent Parted Magic live cd so I booted up with that to downsize the XP partition and free up space for Gutsy. Once Parted Magic booted up, I opened Gparted to downsize the XP partition. But Gparted refused to allow a resizing of the partition because it said it found at least 1 bad sector on the disk. It further said I should run 'chkdsk /f /r' in Windows and reboot it twice. It said that after that, I could resize NTFS safely by additionally using the "bad-sectors option" of ntfsresize.
So I booted into XP to run chkdsk in the command line. Although I had no other programs running, the chkdsk utility told me it would only run on reboot because there were other utilities running. So I rebooted the computer, Chkdsk ran, and after checking the drive, said the disk was perfectly fine i.e. no bad sectors. I rebooted the computer twice, then went back into Parted Magic, and Gparted still said it found at least 1 bad sector on the disk and refused to resize. I went back to XP and ran chkdsk again, and again it found no bad sectors. Again I went into Gparted, and again it said it found at least 1 bad sector. So I don't know whether there is really a bad sector or not, and furthermore Gparted will not allow me to downsize the XP partition. (1) Which utility is wrong: CHKDSK or Gparted? Could this discrepancy represent a bug in Gparted? How can I be confirmed if there really is a bad sector or not? (2) If there is no bad sector and Gparted is incorrect, then how can I get Gparted to downsize the ntfs partition? (The "ntfsresize" utility is not so easy to use as gparted, because "ntfsresize" only shrinks the file system, not the partition. Then you have to use fdisk to shrink the partition and you have to match the size of the partition to the size of the file system, otherwise it won't work.) _______________________________________________ bug-parted mailing list bug-parted@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-parted
