Problems resizing NTFS parbreastion 764

So folks,

I was searching for an answer to the problem this guy was having. I had Win XP on a 40 GB drive installed in a Compaq laptop, and wanted to convert to a dual-boot with FC5. So, I wanted to shrink down the hard drive from 40GB to 20GB (to free 20GB for FC5 to work with). I tried a few different boot loaders, and i was thinking that each one had old versions of ntfsresize because I couldn't get any of them to shrink the drive. I had deleted and freed up 25GB, so the drive showed only 15 GB were on the drive. So slicing the drive into two 20GB drives sounds reasonable right? I would try:

ntfsresize -s 20GBvar-hda1

And every time it would say:

Resetting $LogFile ... (this might take a while) Relocating needed data ... Please try to free less space.

So I thought "what the hell?" I'm only taking up 15GB, what's wrong?

As it turns out, ntfsresize isn't doing a typical disk defrag like we might expect...and it doesn't seem to be able to move fragmented files in an efficient manner. So I went back and booted into Win XP, did a disk defrag, and came back.

I finally settled on using the Gparted Live boot loader (0.2.4-2), which is fabulous for resizing the drive. It contains ntfsresize, version 1.13.0. Get Gparted live here:

I must warn though, the commands it's using to resize the drive is ntfsresize, with the -force option. So, if you try multiple times to resize the drive, and you're worried about losing data, be careful using Gparted. It's most likely using the -force option because it wants you to run chkdsk and -force will go ahead and attempt to resize instead of giving you an error saying you MUST run chkdsk first.

So, if you try to resize and you get this error, I highly recommend that you defrag your drive first, then come in and attempt to resize. Before I defragged, i was able to get it to resize from 40 GB down to about 36GB. So there must not have been any info on the last 4GB of the disk. If the defrag doesn't work, then read on in this chain and see if anything else helps. I found the other stuff in here to be somewhat unhelpful, but a defrag did the trick. I just wanted to post since this guy kinda gave up and didn't give any answers to his problem. I think this may be a common problem, and I didn't see too many other forums attempting to clear this up.