[fenderfreek]

Here's what I've got -

I have a 5 Gb empty block ahead of my WinXP partition and a 6 Gb empty block after it...here's why - I originally had a 5Gb recovery partition at the beginning of the drive, but sonce I bought the recovery DVD for my machine, I cleared that space for Linux. That space had become really cramped from trying to install all my dev. tools and packages, and as you can imagine, was disaster.

So...I used qtparted to shrink my WinXP partition by 6 Gb, which went off without a hitch, but now it won't let me move the Win partition back any more, so that I can defrag again and resize so that the entire 11 Gb of free space into one contiguous block.

I know what the easiest, and perhaps the best way is, but I really, really, don't want to reformat and reinstall Windows, b/c I have a lot of prgrams installed and configured that I'd really rather not spend an entire day getting going again, so as an alternative, I'm gonna throw this out there - is there any way to make an "image" or something of my WinXP partition, then reformat, repartition so the Linux space is together, then load it right back up, just like before, only in a different partition?

I know this is rediculously long and complicated, but thanks in advance to anyone who can figure this one out.

[saikee]

You are going to have a problem mate.

XP was installed in the 2nd partition of that disk and it won't like to find itself in the 1st partition when you remove the recovery partition. It will refuse to boot!

Your best bet is to make the first partition as small as possible and enlarge the 2nd partion, where XP resides, so that XP's own record matches its partition position.

You can't move a XP partition around because it has a record of its partition position in more than one file. One of them is the hidden system file boot.ini.

[fenderfreek]

I've already removed the recovery partition and installed Linux in it, and it has no trouble with that...it's just that now I have that free space there and I need it to be bigger, hence the qtparted business.

[saikee]

You should be able to resize XP up and down as often as you want with Partition Magic. Not used QTParted often enough to confirm if it have the same functionality but I have thought you should be able to expand the partition same as to compress it.

[fenderfreek]

I'll give partition magic a shot. QTparted lets me move the end, just not the beginning of my XP partition around.

[fenderfreek]

Used Partition Magic on it and it worked wonderfully. Thanks!

[saikee]

Just a caution note on Partition Magic.

This software is good for XP but do NOT use for Linux partitions. Use QTParted instead.

PM is known to have issues with Linux partitions and offers to "fix" the error it finds in Linux partitions. Users who accept the offer often ending up with a corrupt partition table. PM is a Windows software and should be confined to that OS. Using it elsewhere can have unpleasant results.

As a rule never believe what PM reports on errors found in Linux partitions. Investigate it by LInux's own partitioning software.