Resizing FAT32 produces unexpected results

[Teppo Peltonen]

Hello,

I have a IBM Thinkpad A20p with Windows 2000 installed. The laptop
uses a 17G IBM hard disk. There was one large FAT32 partition.

I defragmented the drive using disk tools from windows and then tried
to reduce it´s size by four megs to install a Linux on it. I booted
using the partboot-1.4.2.img disk image from ftp.gnu.org.

When I started parted, it warned me about the disk geometry,
2343/240/63 and said that cylinder 1024 ends at 7559.999M. I found no
way to check the geometry from the BIOS. However, a Windows
diagnostics utility included with the laptop installation gave similar
information and I ignored the warning.

Here´s the output of the print command:

Disk geometry for /dev/hda: 0.000-17297.929 megabytes
Disk label type: msdos
Minor   Start   End     Type Filesystem    Flags
1       0.031   17297.929       primary FAT     boot,lba

(Sorry for typos, copied those by hand.)

Then I said 

resize 1 0.031 13269.445

The hard disk worked for a while. Then an error message appeared,
something about a file being really 1K and taking 80K. Sorry, didn´t
take that one up. I said "Ignore" and the hard disk continued to work
for something like 10 or 15 minutes. Finally, the hard disk stopped
and no messages were displayed. I said "quit" and tried to boot back
to Windows to check that everything was ok.

The boot sequence stopped early on an error message:

Windows 2000 could not start because the following file is missing or
corrupt:
windows 2000 root\system32\ntoskrnl.exe
Please re-install a copy of the above file.

Now, what did I miss? Backed all the data up, but still a bit annoying
;-/.

Fdisk from Redhat 7.0 installation cd thinks that the hda1 partition
is FAT16. Is that normal? Don´t know what it said before the
resizing...

Any comments appreciated,

Teppo

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