Shrink Windows partition from Linux

[bonesTdog]

I have read enough posts on this topic to be concerned, but many of them are Win XP related, so thought I would post this just in case.

I have a dual booted notebook with Win7 installed at sda1. I have used the Windows partition manager to shrink the Windows partition as far as it will let me, but there is still 88GB unused even after defrag since it can only shrink the partition to the first unmovable file.

Question - can I safely shrink that partition from Linux using gparted, or am I flirting with disaster by doing that? Unfortunately, I need to keep my Win 7 running and don't want to risk having to re-install just to gain 88GB. My data is on sdb2, so no worries about that.

[Jonathan183]

Changing disk partition size always has a risk associated with it. Personally I'd use gparted to do the partition resize in the first place. You could always mount the partition in Linux and use it for swap files and/or storage anyway - ntfs-3g driver should allow read/write.

[bonesTdog]

Thanks. I was hoping to format it ext4, but I think I may just leave it alone and use the space as ntfs if I need it. Just seems too risky and I definitely don't want to crash it. Thanks for your help.