Binary package hint: gparted
Not sure how to best describe this, but confirmed it with several recent versions of gparted, including the one inside the live Hardy CD, two bootable gparted CDs, and a Mandriva live CD. The gparted program runs normally, but the NTFS partition cannot be resized. There is a yellow triangle with an exclamation point, and the information says that BadClust could not be decompressed, that the contents are unreadable, and that some operations are not available, obviously including the resizing operation. The partition can be mounted, and I can wander around inside the data files, but of course that locks the partition in gparted, and it still can't be resized. Unmounting it also works, but then it goes back to the yellow triangle state...
Not sure how much background of what kind is needed, but here goes: The machine in question is a Sharp PC-WA70-L. I've been running Ubuntu in the other partition for about a year. The machine ships with the main NTFS partition (about 80 GB), a smaller partition that I converted for Ubuntu (about 11 GB), and a recovery partition (about 6 GB), so I didn't need to use gparted before this. However, now I want to split off a fresh partition and try Hardy from scratch there. Ubuntu has never run that well on the machine, actually, and based on the live CD tests, it already seems pretty certain that at least one of the problems remains unsolved.
As usual, I'll be glad to do a certain amount of diagnostic work, but I don't want to make a career out of it...
I still don't know how to describe it properly... This time I'm trying to describe the workaround or quasi-fix. After tweaking it for a while, my hypothesis was that gparted was looking for some information about the bad clusters which had never been created on the NTFS partition (or somewhere else?). My theory was that the Windows hard disk utilities might be able to create the required information, but after that it gets really fuzzy in a bunch of mysterious Japanese explanations that I couldn't fully follow. Basically I used the disk checker from inside of Windows. At first it wouldn't do anything useful, but when I tweaked one of the few settings it gave me a warning and seed to do something more. That still wasn't enough to satisfy gparted, but some more reboots triggered the non-Windows checkdisk function, and after that it appears that gparted was at least able to find the bad cluster information.
At this point I was mostly working with the latest bootable gparted CD, but that one was still unable to resize the NTFS partition for some reason. However, I used the version of gparted on the Hardy Heron CD, and that was finally able to do it.
P.S. There was still some residual nastiness... I'll give the outline in case someone else in a similar boat winds up here... The swap partition had used up my last primary. To make the extended partition I had to unmount the swap partition that the Hardy Heron bootable CD was using, destroy the swap partition, shuffle things around, create an extended partition, and then recreate the swap partition and install Hardy Heron. However, at that point the original Gutsy Gibbon partition had an fstab file that referred to a non-existent swap partition, so I had to manually edit that file to add the swap information from the new Hardy Heron fstab. So far everything seems to be working properly.
P.P.S. About the ultimate cause, I suspect that it was some kind of non-standard optimization by the Sharp people. This machine has a number of peculiarities that cause problems with Ubuntu. The most annoying is that the network adapter still doesn't initialize properly, even in Hardy Heron. Each time I boot, I have to right click on the network and unselect "Enable Networking", and then do it again and select it as enabled, and after about 10 seconds it will connect to the network. There's also a problem with the display driver that freezes it once in a while in Gutsy, but I haven't used Heron enough to know if that bug has been fixed.