Do distro installers downsize shrink Windows 2186

Snip...

As another poster mentioned, I believe SuSE can do this, too (although I have NOT done this myself--caveat emptor). As always, I would not do the NTFS resize anyway without backing the filesystem beforehand.

I think some parbreastioners which do the NTFS resize depend on versions of of the beta Linux NTFS which can write files back to NTFS only when that file is precisely unchanged (especially size). This is generally totally unacceptable, of course, in normal operation. But it can be quite useful if an NTFS filesystem is not in actual use (such as a Linux install).

AIUI, reading NTFS with Linux isn't so bad. It's just writing files back to NTFS which can be "iffy" at times.

And finally, if M$ wasn't so anal about their specs, we wouldn't need to be wasting time and money with something that should be trivial, as with FAT filesystems for years now.

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