Partition problem

[Fornhamfred]

Welcome to Mint.

Use the partition manager in the Control Centre on the Live CD to change the size of the Windows partition. You will need at least a root and swap partition for Mint. If you want both windows and Mint to access the same data it is worth having a Fat32 partition as both systems can read and write to this format.

When you run partition manager you can setup all the required partitions and then during the install manually tell the installer where to install Mint. If you need any further info please just ask.

[Fornhamfred]

Sorry

Yes I do mean g-parted. Have not come across this problem but have a look at this it may help or at least point you in the right direction.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/222931

The alternative would be to install another harddrive to use for Linux.

Good Luck.

[kansasnoob]

If this happens to be Vista I almost never use Gparted for resizing Vista anyway. IMO you're much better off using Vista's own partitioning tools:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows- ... ows-vista/

BTW, the "!" in the yellow caution sign does indicate that Linux can't "read" the data on the NTFS partition, but shouldn't particularly prevent resizing unless there simply isn't enough free space on the disc. Although I frequently I use an actual Gparted Live CD for resizing, rather than an Ubuntu or Mint Live CD, simply because it boots more quickly.

How much free space is there on the disc? And what size is the disc? XP or Vista?

[MeanmanXraytech]

MeanmanXraytech :AKA under paid Pawn

I had a similar problem with Vista. I had to do a disk clean up and hard drive defragmentation This took about 8 Hours. Make sure you turn off your screensaver and antivirus etc. Good LUCK !!

Or put in another hardrive if windows does not cooperate.

[AK Dave]

I've been very happy with Gparted LiveCD for resizing ntfs partitions. Works fine. The "!" for ntfs is just that you need to mount it as ntfs-3g. No biggie, really.

Resizing ntfs Windows partitions is a HUUUUUGE pain.

You'll need to defrag the partition 2-4 times before you have any decent concatenation of the data and any respectable freespace to work with. It is faster and easier to ghost the partition, repartition, reformat, and then rewrite all of the data back where it came from.

[kansasnoob]

I have XP Home and 20 gigs of free space on the hard drive. From what I have read Gparted will not resize a partition that it cannot read. I just need to find out how to get rid of the "!" inside of the yellow triangle.

Gparted itself need only be able to read what's used, not the data itself. I'd start by booting into Windows and doing two things:

#1: Go to Accessories > System Tools > Defrag again, but before you even start to (or decide to) defrag, click "analyze" & look at the "map". Is there "unmovable" crap at both ends of the drive? If so you're pretty much done! (Also I didn't ask the size of the drive, it's common for a Windows drive to start acting up when it approaches 80% of capacity).

#2: Burn an actual Gparted Live CD. It boots much more quickly and is dependent on nothing but itself. But be darn sure you know what you want to do before you start! You can DL a CD here:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfile ... _id=173828

It's a small DL, must be burned as ISO, and it boots quickly. There are newer versions available but I don't recommend that for a n00b like myself, gparted-livecd-0.3.4-11 should work fine!

[grizwald]

I experienced a problem with installing Mint alongside an existing working installation of XP the other day. As usual, the Mint installation from the live CD caused problems with the operation of XP and tweaking the H/D partitions was required to get everything working properly. The partition software on the live CD wasn't up to the task, nor unfortunately was a standalone version of gparted. Tried all sorts of 'work arounds' resulting in a real mess with only Mint working properly.

The solution/saviour was a program called parted magic, downloadable free from http://partedmagic.com/downloads/stable/ which performed all the necessary functions first time. This is a graphical program just like regular gparted but with no greyed out commands, it all worked perfectly - and quickly!

The offending Mint partition was resized and then moved down the drive making room to stretch the XP partition to a usable size in just a few minutes. Spent over a day trying other ideas and suggestions without success, hence my enthusiasm for this solution.

This program is now in my "Tool Kit" for next time......

Hope the above information helps others get out of trouble as easily as it did for me.

Cheers,

Grizwald.