Scheduling the disk check

chkdsk /f (Get XP to check your disk for errors)

G-Parted is very nice to you.... Later on when you get to the repartioning stage if your hard drive has errors that Windows XP hasn't noticed about it will refuse to move files around the disk. If it did move files you might lose data so it really is being very nice to you. The best thing to do is to get Windows to perform a quick sanity check of your disk before you start the G-Parted process. If you don't do this and there are errors then G-Parted will tell you to restart the process and do this anyway. You might as well do it now as it wont take long.

From within Windows XP click 'Start' and then 'Run..'. In the dialogue box type 'cmd.exe' and hit ok. This will load the command prompt interface. At the command prompt type 'chkdsk /f' (no quotes). This will ask you if you want to schedule a filesystem check, 'yes' is a good answer to this. Windows is now ready to check your disk for you but it can't do this while it is running as it is currently using the disk.

Restart your computer... During boot windows will perform the file system checks that you just scheduled. These may take no time at all or if your harddrive is in a bit of a mess it could take hours (pretty unlikely, most of the time hard drives are in a good state). Once it completes windows will startup.

You now need to restart again so that the changes take effect. After this 2nd reboot you can continue with downloading the CD image and the repartioning steps.

G-Parted Download

As I already mentioned we are going to use the 'G-Parted Live CD' version of GNU Parted. If you have not come across the term before a Live CD is an operating system in its own right that is self contained on a CD/DVD so that you can boot from it. Once booted the OS loads into memory. By doing this the hard drive is no longer being used and so we (or rather G-Parted) can move files around safely. (if you are interested The G-Parted Live CD is actually a version of Linux called 'Slackware' but if this means nothing to you or you don't care its not important).

To create the G-Parted CD you need to download the CD image. This is small (approx 30MB) and can be downloaded from the G-Parted Website. Save the ISO image to a convinient location.

Burn the CD

You now need to create the CD itself from the ISO image that you just downloaded. Open up your prefered CD burning application and burn the CD image to disk. There is a comprehensive guide on ISO burning available here.

Restart!

Keep the CD in the drive and restart your computer. Whilst your computer boots if you are asked if you want to boot from the CD then select yes or press a key so that it does. (If booting from the CD doesn't work you may need to check that you have your CD drive listed in the boot sequence of your BIOS. Setting this up varies from PC to PC so you may need to read your motherboard/BIOS manual). Once the CD starts to boot lots of commands will scroll off the screen as the G-Parted application (or rather the version of Linux that it runs from) loads itself into memory. Do not panic! Nothing is being altered, nothing is being installed to your computer its just loading itself into memory.

Keyboard & Video Settings

Select you country/keyboard settings and then a video option. If after you select a video option the screen looks wrong restart and try again. VESA is a good option to go for if you don't really know what to select, setting a low bit depth (8 or 16) also tends to give your graphics card an easier time and is more likely to work.

The interface of the G-Parted Live CD

Repartioning

Now comes the part that we have been building to... After specifying the keyboard and video your computer should have finished booting up and you'll see a graphical desktop with the G-parted program loaded up and ready to go (figure 1). (Depending on the specific hard drive in your machine the values displayed will likely be different from figure 1.) Click on the '/dev/hda1' option and then the 'Resize/Move' menu item.

A dialogue pops up asking for the new size of this partion.

In figure 1 the partion was originally 111.78GB and only 39.81GB of it was used. Its good to leave around 10GB for Windows XP to play with and who knows you may need to install more applications on there in the future so be sure to add a few more GB on to whatever your current XP installation is taking up. In the examples I choose to resize my 111GB partion to 55GB. That gives another 15GB for Windows XP to use and plenty of space for future applications. The remaining 56GB can be used to contain other operating systems.

Once you enter your values hit the 'Resize/Move' button and the process will begin.

Finished

That's it! You have now resized your Windows XP partition thus freeing up a chunk of your disk to install additional operating systems on. You can verify that everything is resized by booting back into Windows (don't forget to take the G-Parted Live CD out first) and then viewing your free disk space in My Computer.