Anybody experienced with parted partition editor, and its requirements
for partition resizing? It doesn't seem to want to do that for me.

I wanted to shrink a large hda2 (ext3) in place. It's on a full disk,
preceded by a "sliver" partition (that was made for /boot) and
followed by another partition (that was created for "swap") occupying
the remainder of the disk. I wanted to leave the beginning of hda2
where it is (parted doc says you must), but slide the end of it
forward.

My parted tool is the qtparted found in knoppix 3.3. I boot from
knoppix in order to operate qtparted. qtparted
(http://qtparted.sourceforge.net/) is a program that uses the same
underlying libraries as regular parted but puts a partition-magic-like
graphical front end on top of it .

qtparted doesn't want to resize my partition. My only feedback is a
greyed-out "resize" option on a menu. Nothing more informative like
error messages or anything like that. I get the same thing when I
delete all the partitions and create a new one with fdisk having free
space on both sides. What are the conditions required to allow parted
to perform a resize?