Windows – Resizing partitions without moving or losing data (dual boot)

A1 -> merge it to make A1+B1.
A2 -> NTFS
B2 -> Can bring it down to ~ 40 GB, allocate remaining to A2.
That would be my recommendation.

as I read NTFS does not work nice with permission

I'm not sure what you mean by this ?

1) format the data partition to ext2/3/4 and move my home folder from linux there, and get a driver to read ext partitions in windows 7.

Not recommended, especially since you don't want a read-only file system.

http://www.fs-driver.org/ looks promising, but I'm not sure how it works with ext4 and windows 7 (not officially supported, when trying in vista compatibility mode, it tells me I need to format the ext drive to use it)

ext4 filesystems cannot be read under current drivers, if extents option is enabled ( and I believe most distros using ext4 do have extents enabled by default).

keep the home folder in ubuntu where it is, but create symlinks for the Documents, Music, etc folders to an NTFS formatted Data (A2) partition

This is my current setting as well.

If you've just damaged the partition table, all is not lost. The underlying data is likely still there!

As the original partition was NTFS, I'd recommend findntfs. It's a command line utility that runs over the disk and generates a report of all files it finds.

It's a little tricky to get the syntax right, but easy to use once you've worked it out.

1. (Optional) Mount your damaged drive as read-only
2. Run findntfs from another drive that has enough space to recover your data
3. Generate a list of files and folders (findntfs 2 0 1 1 files files.txt), where numbers are CHS
4. In that list, find the folder with your photos, find its ID number (say 117)
5. Recover that folder! findntfs 2 0 1 1 copy 117