What has always puzzled me is fragmentation. Surely before you resize the NTFS partition, any bits at the end must be moved to that part that will stay. This means mounting and writing to the NTFS volume directly. I would be ever so surprised if openSUSE did this during install. Perhaps on a brand new Vista, where things are not yet all through the partition, you can get away with it. By luck. Otherwise, I remain in the camp of non-believers.
An NTFS partition should always be de-fragged prior to re-sizing. But even W7's partitioner (which is diskpart under the hood) will not do that for the user, it needs to be done beforehand (Windows has a built-in sizing delimiter which essentially compensates for this, i.e., it does not permit down-sizing beyond a particular pct). If the partition is de-fragged first, then the Linux partitioning tool usually does fine. But not always, and actually this has become more problematic in the last couple years. Where I have seen recurring issues - and hence why I always stick whenever possible to the old rule-of-thumb of modifying partitions with the OS that created them - is with the partition table. Windows sometimes uses the table (and the partition boot sector) for proprietary functions; this varies by Windows version and even by which features are enabled (e.g., BitLocker writes to the disk signature). There is little documentation covering this, and what there is is only at MSDN. There are even obscure compatibility issues between Vista/W7 and XP/earlier. Secondarily, some manufacturers (particularly with laptops) do strange and undocumented things with the partitioning, including writes to the table. I've seen this with various recovery image schemes. I've also seen bios hooks where recovery and other "value-added features" have been implemented; these can get broken. The safest method is MS's diskpart from the Recovery Console booted from CD/DVD. Linux can usually do the job, but there can be unseen risks - more so since Vista. IME wise to take all precautions; fixing a broken table is not fun at all. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org