Many thanks to Charles Curley for the links. QTparted on Knoppix 5.0 crashed when trying to get info from hda with an NTFS formatted XP on it. He suggested Finnix, which I downloaded, but it runs in init2, and I apologise, but didn't look forward to resizing NTFS partitions in text mode. Saying that I'll use Finnix from time to time, and try to do stuff in text mode. After all it's all good experience. The link to.http://gparted.sourceforge.net/ solved the problem. I downloaded the gparted live cd, version-0.2.5.5.iso. Now I always use KDE, but have to give credit to Gnome for this. this DL was only 27.9MB (on dialup again, because I'm stuck on that), and I'm feeling very pessimistic that this is going to solve the problem. Anyway I burn the iso to CD-R, and go for it. I put XP in it's harddrive caddy into the machine, press go, and insert the CDROM with gparted on it, press enter to boot gparted, and I get a GUI. Amazing. Highlight hda, which is already there, click on resize (I bet XP won't like this, but hard cheese), give XP 12GB (more than it deserves), and click on apply. Well it's doing something, and runs for about 40mins, but does say it might take a while. OK. gparted says "job done". I must admit that pessimism is still hanging around. Click on eject, and reboot. The disc is ejected but no reboot. No problem. A hard reset reboots XP. XP for the the first time that I know runs CHKDSK (probably annoyed that it's file sysem has been messed with), then having accepted that it's ok, reboots, in the usual Windows style. Well, all I can say is that Gparted has done the job. XP is now showing that it's using 11.72GB of the 40GB drive, and all the rest is free space, and certainly enough for a couple of Linux distro's. Enough said. Nigel. .
