Resize an active XP partition

[speckytecky]

I want to resize an active Windows XP partition - how do I do it please?

[Geoff]

Grab the gParted LiveCD.

GParted -- LiveCD

Burn, boot, then follow these instructions.

GPARTED DOCUMENTATION - RESIZING

[speckytecky]

Thanks Geoff - and it works OK with XP?

[Geoff]

It'll force a chkdsk on reboot just to play it safe. But yes.

[Ignatius]

It'll force a chkdsk on reboot just to play it safe. But yes.

I saw a comment elsewhere recently about someone who tried to use it but it screwed with something and the disk became inaccessible. I can't remember what the problem was but I made a mental note that I would make a full backup before using it, just in case!

[speckytecky]

Apologies for being back at this thread again folk but for some reason GParted's not working for me as it should.

The HD I am trying to resize is a 56GB disk currently split into: C: of 26GB, Unallocated of 5GB, E: of 17GB and a F: of 7GB

Dev/sda1 ntfs boot of 27.94 GiB used 24.58GiB unused 3.36GiB Flag boot
dev/sda2 extended 27.94GiB flag lba (which seems to me to be the one above shown again?)
next an unallocated unformatted 5GiB (I want to resize the boot to include this space).
next dev/sda5 ntfs of 16.55GiB used 6.63GiB unused 9.92GIB no flag.
next dev/sda6 fat of 6.38GiB used 3.67GiB unused 2.71GiB.
finally the windows unallocated 7.84MiB

When I click on the sda1 or 2 and try a resize nothing happens - can't move the slider to the right - is there something complementary I'm missing?

[R0M]

When I click on the sda1 or 2 and try a resize nothing happens - can't move the slider to the right - is there something complementary I'm missing?

Could just be a shot in the dark here but I remember when I was trying to resize my partitions at home I had;

1) Windows -NTFS
2) Ubunu - EXT4
3) SUSE - EXT3
4) SWAP - partition for both the Linux OSs

and I chucked in a live disk to try and shuffle them around and I couldn't then I found that the live disk had mounted the SWAP partition and effectively locked the drive so I had to swap off and unmount the drive first.

[speckytecky]

Flipping C: drive has many, many bad sectors on it now anyhow so won't boot to XP. Boots form a live disk fine and everything is there for transferring off, so I'm looking at swapping in a replacement drive now.