Windows reports discrepancy in partition sizes after resizing with gparted

Question

My drive was formatted to look like the following:

Partition 1 - NTFS - 100Gb for Windows XP
Partition 4 - Extended Partition
Partition 5 - EXT3 - Linux boot partition - 200 Mb
Partition 6 - XFS - Linux root partition - 20 Gb
Partition 7 - XFS - Linux /usr/local partition - 20 Gb
Partition 8 - XFS - Linux /home partition - 100 Gb

I then fired up a Linux LiveCD and ran gparted, deleting partitions 4 through 8, only leaving my Windows XP partition. I then resized my NTFS partition to take up the full 240 Gb.

Sucess.

However, right clicking on drive C and pulling up properties still shows the drive (partition) size as 100 Gb. In contrast with that, however, the disk manager in MMC shows the partition size as 240 Gb.

Thus, I have two related questions:

1. Will I be able to use the full 240 Gb I now have available to me?
2. Can I do something so that Windows XP correctly sees the 240 Gb?

One other thought:

I've considered dropping the drive into Windows Vista / 7 and seeing if drive manager will allow me to shrink and then expand the partition, fixing whatever Windows XP might be using to see the drive size as 100Gb. Do you think that might work?

Answer 1

It turns out that GParted didn't work correctly. I dropped the drive into Windows Vista and pulled up disk manager.

Vista's disk manager showed the partition as taking up the full drive. Uncertain that it would allow me to expand the partition, since it showed all the space was used, I shrank the partition. It allowed me to shrink it by up to 776 Megs, presumably because of the location of various files within the partition.

The result of shrinking the partition was a size of 99 Gb, not 239 Gb. It shrank the partition based on the previous size -- and the size reported by C:\ properties.

I then expanded the partition. The result was correct. Both disk manager and C:\ properties reported the correct partition size of 240 Gb.