Today, I needed to resize/shrink my Windows partition (on my laptop of work) so I had some (free) allocated space to be able to install Ubuntu next to it. Reason why can be found here ;-) !
I mostly use Partition Magic for doing these kinds of operations. But today, it went wrong. I wasn't able to open the partition table. I was receiving the error: 117 Partition's drive letter cannot be identified. However, I was perfectly able to boot my Windows XP system. Yeah, can't explain why? That's why we have Windows? :p
So I tried shrinking with gparted, a Linux program which is included in the Ubuntu Live CD. But nevertheless, gparted was not able to open the partition table. I did some research and I noticed the helpdesk of my company didn't create my primary partition very well :-/. The partition was really-in-the-middle of my HDD. I don't know why/how/... but it was pretty much fucked up :-). So normally, you just remove the partition and start over again. But the people of the helpdesk worked 2 hours on my laptop, so I didn't want to spend 2 hours waiting for a second remastering process.
After Googling, I noticed a blog post which told me I had to use EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition (http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm). It looks really similar to PM, BUT, it's totally FREE :-).
I installed and tested the program, and the Partition Master was able to read my partition table from the MBR. I could then move the primary (NTFS) partition to the head of the cylinder block. This was done without loosing data! After applying changes (and writing the new partition table to the MBR), I was able to shrink the NTFS partition and install Ubuntu.
So go go EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition ! It's worth a try!
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