On Jan 17, 2008 2:56 AM, Nishit Dave stargazer.dave@gmail.com wrote:
List,
I want to create a partition on my laptop by freeing up space from my C: drive, NTFS. I have been reading documentation on Gparted, but I could not determine if it requires contiguous free space within a partition to shrink it and create a new one with free space.
Essentially windows is a wimp when it comes to losing space. It bawls aloud and will play dead if some "data" files happen to be on the space which was taken away.
Its always a good idea to defrag the partitions you are resizing.
The defragmentation utility provided with Windows XP does not consolidate free space. Would using Gparted to repartition the disc, after such (suboptimal) defragmentation, result into loss of data, or will it use only the free space? It would seem visually that Gparted will use free space, but there are conflicting opinions everywhere.
The windows defrag won't consolidate the free space but consolidates the used space and with its own idea of how a file might grow. The rest is left to grabs.
I would say if you had an option, try using windows within qemu / virtualbox.
regards, C