>>Why are you paritioning? You could just put all data into 1 folder tree or have two drives.
>
>Well, I guess I didn't write the other message with the proper terminology. I can have one partition. I just need a C: drive and a D: drive. Right now, everything is under C: with the Allocated 7 MB one.

You could create a folder in, say the root of C: drive, called C:\DDrive. Share that folder as "DDrive", then either use Windows Explorer to map the drive or from a command prompt issue

NET USE D: \\MyComputerName\DDrive /persistent:y

This will work fine as long as you just want a local drive letter D: for testing. I'd avoid repartitioning if you can avoid it.

I've done some work with Windows NTFS partitions using open-source tools such as GPartEd and Knoppix. I, too own PartitionMagic 6.0. The problem with that product is that it does not support NTFS 3.1, which is the version of NTFS used in Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Vista. It only supports NTFS 1.2 (NT 4.0) and NTFS 3.0 (Windows 2000).

Using the open-source tools, generally EXPANDING or EXTENDING an NTFS partition works fine. You need to be extremely careful if trying to shrink an existing NTFS partition. What you need to do is:

- Run the Windows defragger on the partition before you do anything else.
- When it's finished, look at the graphical display - if all files are bunched together at the beginning then shrinking should be OK. If not (i.e. there are some "unmovable" files further out along the drive) you basically can't shrink the partition any smaller than the end of those unmovable files. I tried that once (in GPartEd) and the operation failed, but the partition type was switched to "Raw" from "NTFS" and there were lots of errors on trying to reboot. I had to restore the partition from an image backup I made earlier.

BTW the NTFSClone command-line utility works great for creating image backups of any NTFS partition. One thing that really annoys me is that image-backup software companies like Acronix and Symantec charge small $ to back up XP, but charge big $ to back up Windows 2003 Server. There is no technical reason to charge more, they're both NTFS 3.1 - they're just out to gouge Server users. I run Server 2003 R2 EE as my dev box and it's already saved my bacon a couple of times.