Re: defragmenting/resizing

[Bilal Ahmad <bahmad@cisco.com>]

First, thanks to Jaye, Francois, Ralk, and Micha for the helpful 
suggestions. Following the suggestions, this is what I did:

1. I read some reviews about Partition Magic on amazon.com and found that 
it worked for some and not for others. So I decided not to spend the $70.

2. I tried qtparted from the Knoppix 3.2 CD. It doesn't give you an option 
to defragment, only to define the new partitions.

I decided to wipe the hard drive and do a clean install of windows xp from 
the system restore CDs (set of 4) that came with the laptop. This 
distribution of xp formats the entire drive, and re-installs everything to 
the factory settings. After the reinstall I "analyzed" the disk using 
windows disk defragmenter, and was pleasantly surprised to see that it had 
kept everything in the first 12G of the 40G space. Then I booted with the 
Knoppix 3.2 CD, and tried to resize using ntfsresize. First time around it 
reported of cluster errors. I went back to windows, scheduled chkdsk at 
boot time. Another boot into windows fixed the errors. Then I booted with 
the Knoppix CD again, and successfully used ntfsresize to shrink the 
windows partition to 18G. Following the resize, I booted windows again, and 
it works fine.

Now, onto the fun stuff..... Though I have a lot of reading to do on 
patching kernel to support the hardware on this laptop.

Thanks again, all.

-----
Bilal