How to shrink a windows partition to make more room for Linux?

[joe at actionline.com]

Thanks again to all who have responded and provided suggestions.

Someone said, "It helps if you don't get snippy." I sincerely apologize if
some of my comments have seemed "snippy." No excuses. It is never
acceptable for frustration to come across in that way in trying to respond
to all of the suggestion people have made as I have tried every one and
still can't get the target partition (or file system) to shrink.

It even shows up in two different sizes in XP "disk management" as shown
in this screen shot:

- - - http://upquick.com/linux/xpdiskmgmt.jpg - - -

Notice: (C:) NTFS shows as having 6.53 GB and 2.13 GB Free ... but then it
*also* shows as "Disk 0" with 186.30 GB in which (C:) has 158.67 GB NTFS

So, ntfsresize successfully changed the size of (C:), but Windows Disk
Management is showing conflicting information.

Go figure.

Following are responses to most of the other suggestions and questions so
far:

- do not have sda5 mounted -- Check. It has not been mounted.

- use Windows to resize its own partition. -- Check. Tried to do so, but
found no option to do that.

- turn off paging and restore functions go to disk management and shrink
the partition -- Check.  Had trouble finding "disk management" but finally
did by searching for it.

- Someone asked: Why do you say it has been resized and then show that
according to gparted it has not been resized?

- I also like defraggler -- Check.  I ran both defrag and defraggler
several times each.

- what version of Windows you are trying to do something with? XP

- GParted is buggy. I use cfdisk and fdisk instead. -- Don't now how to
use either one, but will investigate.

- It looks like your sda1 is an extended drive. -- Yes it is.

- Are the remaining drives primary or logical? -- Shown in the attachment.

- I think there's a misunderstanding because you use the term partition
  when you mean filesystem. -- Sorry for causing confusion.  I hope the
screen shots clarify.

- the ntfsresize man page partitioning section says to *recreate* (not
resize) the partition that contains the filesystem that has been resized.
-- I don't know how to *recreate* ... but still hope to find out why
gparted has a "resize" option, but it is greyed out.

- I suspect that qtparted may not allow altering the partition size
because it detects that the ntfs filesystem has been altered and needs to
be checked. -- I've run chkdsk, multiple defrags, and error checking with
no errors reported.

- Try starting windows and allow it to run a scandisk (fsck) on the
filesystem, which it should do automatically when you first boot -- Could
not find "scandisk" as M$ has apparently discontinued it. But I found an
"error checking" alternative.

- Then go back and see if qtparted doesn't allow you to resize the
partition. -- I've tried it dozens of times after trying everything that
has been suggested.  Still doesn't work.

- If that doesn't do it, you'll need to delete the partition and re-add it
-- Scary thought.  Don't know how to do that (safely).  Since "resize" is
a feature of gparted (albeit currently greyed out), surely there must be a
way to get it to work.

- manually run scandisk to make sure the volume gets marked as clean. --
Check.  I've done the "error checking" equivalent.

- You can delete a partition completely and then re-add it back to the drive
  without any data loss as long as you keep a few things in mind. -- Very
scared to try this.