First tech tip - Modifying NTFS partition sizes

Here comes my first tech tip. I've got this wonderful Gateway platinum laptop with 2GB RAM (?!) and a 120GB disk but to my dismay it comes with one hugh partition (Well two of them but the other is one is a recovery partition and is of no use). Throwing away the original Windows setup is a waste (Afterall you paid for it and even though I am the opensource nut, Windows sometimes is just easier to handle. Also there are so many opensource software tools available for Windows (with their Linux counterparts ofcourse) that one can completely live off with). But naturally I want the computer to be a dual boot and how do I resize this big fat NTFS partition without messing up the already installed Windows system ?
Here comes Linux to the rescue!! There is a Linux tool (a bunch of them to be exact) that allows handling NTFS partitions. ntfsresize is the tool of my choice and guess what ? The wonderful Knoppix Live CD comes with the whole bunch of ntfs* tools.

So here is what I did

1. Downloaded the Knoppix Live CD ISO
   
2. Burned it into a CD
3. Booted off the new Live CD. And it picks up the existing partitions nicely
4. Ran ntfsresize with 50G as the preferred size

Wola - that worked like a charm. Stay tuned and the next post will take you in another tech adventure when I install Ubuntu in a dual boot configuration :)