Is NTFS resizing safe nowadays?

[Bart Silverstrim]

Phill MV wrote:
> Hullo.
> I have an extra Windows machine on which I'm running 'buntu inside vmware.
> It's acceptable, but a bit overkill as I plan to do lots of dev work inside
> of it.
> Unfortunately, my company's corporate reimaging policy is... a bit tough, so
> I'd very much like to not kill the windows install.

Your company has a reimaging policy that's difficult to work with, but 
they'd let you resize the partition?

Interesting. But at any rate, if it's an option, I'd try a variation on 
what we often do here for imaging/resizing...

Download and burn RIP (Rescue-Is-Possible) Linux.
Mount a Windows share or use a USB drive of sufficient size...
and use Partimage to copy your system's partition to that storage area.

This creates a system-state backup.

Now to resize...
use the disk partition tool from RIP (think it's gparted? A graphical 
utility...use the right click menu to find it). Click the partition and 
select the tools to resize it.
Once resized you should be able to do what you want with the new space. 
We haven't had issues with it here, but we didn't do it to resize an 
additional, in-use system...we deploy images to batches of computers to 
go out as workstations.

If something goes wrong, use partimage to restore your backup partition 
image.

-Bart