Partition tools : (thinking) out of the box

After a round of playing with partitions - both NTFS and EXT2 - I have come to the conclusion that as far as partition tools related to Windows OS is concerned, one needs to think "Linux" to get the best free choices.
The default disk manager does not do much in Windows, and unlike the more thoughtful Linux counterparts, does not allow the user a second chance before applying changes. So if you are confronted with a situation other than creating and deleting partitions, Linux offers a better choice of tools - full blown, GUI supported tools.
While one can use fdisk to delete and create partitions, the real ace is Gparted. This tool not only can create and delete partitions, it can also resize them - including Windows partitions. And making it truely accessibly is the fact that Puppylinux - a 80 MB Linux distro that is so accommodating and flexible to fit and boot from any medium - includes this great tool.

My problem involved a partition that was too small to fit a linux distro. Assuming that a 2 GB partition would be adequate for Opensuse 10.3, I installed the OS to that partition, after removing some unwanted apps before installation. But post installation, I was regularly reminded that I had less than 1% of the disk free. The only solution was to shorten the adjoining NTFS partition and claim more space. The inbuilt partition tool in Opensuse managed this quite admirably. I reduced the NTFS partition by 500 MB and created a new partition to mount /home/. The resizing of the NTFS paritition also sets a chkdsk operation on the next Windows boot. But this did not aleviate the problem of reduced space to install apps - most notably VLC since Opensuse is quite multimedia handicapped out of the box. The second idea was to fuse the newly created /home/ partition with the original partition containing the rest of the installation. To my surprise I found that the inbuilt partition tool in Opensuse did not do expansion -apparently resizing only meant reducing in Opensuse lingo.
My search for partition expansion tools took me to ntfsresize. This command line tool seemed capable of helping me but unlike most of Linux tools did not have a comprehensive documentation which make it unattractive. But ntfsresize is a capable tool that can check NTFS partitions for errors. Unlike fsck.ntfs that also exists, ntfsresize is a resizing tool that actually tests for volume consistency as a step to checking the amount of free space available on that drive (as a precursor to finding the smallest possible size it can be squeezed to). ntfsresize -fi /dev/sdx.
I recalled Puppylinux's partition tool and decided to test it's expansion skills since it was the fastest way I could boot into Linux, since I had already installed it on a USB Drive (by the way, after installing Puppy linux, the drive is rendered unsuable in Windows eventhough Puppy creates a 128 MB FAT partition on the drive. Windows asks whether the drive needs to be formatted when it is plugged in.
Gparted offers all the options to manipulate a parition - expand, reduce, delete, create etc. While it warns to backup the data before starting the partition manipulation, I overlooked it. The /home partition was deleted, the original 2 GB partition was then expanded to include the free space. It may have taken about 15 mins in all.