I recently had a confrontation with Windows XP. Seems the vendor of the computer I was working on was too cheap to provide recovery disks that tolerated the current partitioning table on the hard drive (heck, they were too cheap to provide the disks at all). The following are my notes that I'll need to do this again in the future.
First, you have to defragment the drive. With certain features enabled, there may be unmovable files (normally shown as green bars in the defrag utility). The two most common files are pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys.
To remove pagefile.sys, click on the Start Button, right click on "My Computer", select "Properties", select "Advanced", select "Performance Settings", select "Advanced", select "Virtual Memory Change" and set it to "No Paging File".
To remove hiberfil.sys, from the Windows Control Panel, select "Power Options", click the "Hibernate" tab and unselect "Enable Hibernation".
Now reboot the machine and run the defrag utility.
Then get the System Rescue CD. Boot from that. When it gets to the "boot:" prompt, type in: "fb800 nodetect"
It'll ask you for the keymap. Choose the one for "US".
It'll dump you out at the "root@sysresccd /root %" prompt.
Run "run_qtparted".
Resize the partitions, make sure that you leave enough room so that you don't "hit" the files in the NTFS partition. Add your EXT3 and swap files.
Click on "File" and "Commit". This will take a few minutes.
Quit "run_qtparted".
Type "shutdown -r now" and allow the system to reboot into Windows. It will probably automatically run "chkdisk". Let it run all the way through. Another reboot may be involved (if you're doing the initial install of everything).
Source: http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2006/05/08/dual-boot-laptop.html?page=2
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