You would like to install Linux/BSD but the Windows partition is taking up your whole hard disk space and you don’t want to pay money for commercial solutions? Not to worry, you can resize partitions with the KNOPPIX Live Linux CD.
How-To Resize Your Windows Partition To Make Room
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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This is silly, “How-To Resize your Partition” is not news, even less news about an OS.
This is silly, “This story sucks” is not a useful comment.
Whereas an article that might enable those that would be otherwise reluctant to try alternative operating systems may not be groundbreaking news, but it certainly is helpful.
Not too bad for newbies, if you are expert that does not mean everyone out there is expert too? I think it is good article for those who whish to learn basis of OS and want to give a try to penguin
Using the gentoo Live CD or other Live CD for PowerPC, you can also resize OS X partitions with parted/qtparted. I was skeptical at first, but, with a little tweaking, it worked fine.
http://www.sysresccd.org/
Try this instead. Now when I give people a copy of Linux to install, I include a second disk with SystemRescueCd on it. It slices, it dices and it’s a much smaller download than KNOPPIX.
Ironically enough, I was going to use it today to make my Windoze partition larger.
but I would never trust a Windows install that had been resized. Granted it has been years since I last attempted such a thing, maybe things have gotten better since then. Left to my own devices I would create a disk image then “restore” it to a smaller partition using a tool such as Norton Ghost.
Maybe this method is the same with both steps combined?
If you only trust Windows proprietary tools, Acronis Disk Director Suite is a much better and complete tool, IMO.
The last time I used Ghost (years ago) it wasn’t a flexible tool at all.
Yes, but the problem with that, is most people considering this in the first place don’t have a large enough medium to copy image to before creating new MBR and partition table.
There are dozens of options: Mandriva CD1, SUSE CD1, the Ultimate Boot CD, especially the full version:
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
This is one of the greatest sets of free tools ever created.
I bet this won’t work with dynamic disks. Partition Magic 8 wouldn’t.
just use ntfsresize – part of ntfstools – without the GUI, so you can see what you are really doing:
http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html
I use the parsix livecd, which contains gparted, it seems to work better than qtparted (which is last I checked no longer in development).
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/
http://www.parsix.org/html/index.php
I would never trust an open-source tool to resize my NTFS partitions, even more so due to the fact that the open-source community’s understanding of NTFS is from reverse-engineering and not actual specs from Microsoft.
The last time I trusted an open-source tool to poke my partitions I lost an entire NTFS volume.
Don’t try to write to an NTFS partition, it’s known to be buggy and dangerous. But resizing an NTFS partition is completely different and rock solid. I’ve never lost any data with ntfsresize, but twice with Partition Magic.
And what happens when there is data in the outlying region that you want to eliminate? Don’t tell me these open-source tools are smart enough to locate that data, re-locate it, and update the MFT and other meta data regions — because if they could, we’d have seen NTFS write support ages ago.
Partition Magic has never failed me in the 50 times I’ve used it in my life.
And what happens when there is data in the outlying region that you want to eliminate? Don’t tell me these open-source tools are smart enough to locate that data, re-locate it, and update the MFT and other meta data regions
We, open source NTFS developers, implemented not only all of these you doubt and they work flawlessly over the last three years but we are also able to detect NTFS inconsistencies caused by the Windows driver and even fix what chkdsk can’t. These are documented for example on http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html
Just like Linux 2.6 thought it could fix inconsistencies in people’s partition tables because Windows was doing it the wrong way? (ie. The way that every other OS does it)
I believe you, it’s just that I trust my commercial products more, because they’ve proven their worth to me.
Just like Linux 2.6 thought it could fix inconsistencies in people’s partition tables because Windows was doing it the wrong way? (ie. The way that every other OS does it)
Kernel 2.6 wanted to fix nothing. The HDIO_GETGEO ioctl semantic was changed incorrectly by Andries Brouwer (it broke backward compatibility with earlier kernels) and partitioners started to misbehave. Later he also repeatedly refused to fix his kernel bug and “demanded” the adjustments of the user space tools (which is, well, not very smart idea if you think about what may happen if one uses the new kernel with an older, unadjusted partitioner ==> corruption).
Wow, what a douchebag. Is this seriously what happens in Linux kernel development?
“You broke this, now fix it because people are getting pissed off.”
“No! Everyone else should fix their stuff to accomodate my breakage!”
Couldn’t someone else (like Linus) just fix it and tell him to FOAD?
The last time I trusted an open-source tool to poke my partitions I lost an entire NTFS volume.
Didn’t you take a backup before resizing?
Surely you’d do that regardless of whether you’re using an open source tool or a commercial one?
Nope, because in the 50 or so times that I’ve used Partition Magic in my life, it has failed only once — on a drive that had been making odd sounds the day before.
I quite like PQPM, but it is a known fact that it f*cks up partition tables. The normal course is that it tries to “repair” “errors” on a disc and after that, it can’t deal with it anymore… I haven’t done this 50 or 100 times, but a million times. However, as long as you don’t make fancy dual boot setups, PQPM is quite nice to have.
I would never trust an open-source tool to resize my NTFS partitions, even more so due to the fact that the open-source community’s understanding of NTFS is from reverse-engineering and not actual specs from Microsoft.
The last time I trusted an open-source tool to poke my partitions I lost an entire NTFS volume.
>
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You make this sound like it was some kind of great loss or something.
NTFS is a *f–kING JOKE*
What do you suggest? Ext3? ReiserFS?
Just go away and never come back. Maybe learn something while you’re gone.
I dont use Windows TP.
Booting from Mandriva install CD and you are able to this with a nice GUI, if I am not forgotten the fist time I have done it was with Mandrake about 2 years ago.
I have done ntfs resize with a LOT of systems, never lost any data…
And never had problems. ntfsresize has been solid for years.
Hi. Please let me make some notes because most partitioners mentioned here use ntfsresize internally which we developed and keep maintain actively (such partitioners are qtparted, gparted, Mandriva and SUSE own partitioners, IBM’s EVMS, etc). First some notes on the article.
1) It’s important to save the partition table too before resizing, not only the data. In the last 3.5 years basically all problems happened due to repartitioning (irrelevant to NTFS) and not due to NTFS resizing.
2) Defragmentation is not needed at all. The need for defragmentation is incorrectly documented and required even by several major distros.
3) The recommended Knoppix 3.7 is really old. One should use at least Knoppix 4.0.2.
Some comments on the posts.
Re: SystemRescuceCD
It isn’t maintained for almost 1.5 years and the lack of utility and driver updates upset many users (unusable, waste of time).
Re: call me old fashioned…
Ntfsresize safely relocates any data if needed. An open source Ghost like utility is ntfsclone which is also stable and both are reported to us to be more reliable than their commercial alternatives.
Re: Dynamic Disks
Ntfsresize works but one also needs to modify the independent Dynamic Disks metadata. So users usually just convert to Basic Disk then resize then convert back. See the linux-ntfs-dev archive for more details.
Re: ntfsresize
There is no ntfstools package. Very few distros insist to call ntfsprogs this way and confuse users. I don’t know why.
Re: Parsix?
Yes, qtparted has a few reliability and usability problems and isn’t maintained for 1.5 years. GParted is actively maintained but it’s still not widely used yet.
RE: Trust by leos
No code we officially release is supposed to be buggy, dangerous or even experimental. This is unfortunately a very common misconception.
Qtparted looks alive and well to me.
http://qtparted.sourceforge.net/
hmm, that page design reminds me of the systemresucecd page…
and the changelog for qtparted stop in 2004…
Anonymous wrote:
Qtparted looks alive and well to me.
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-ntfs-dev&m=113295192704031&w=…
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-ntfs-dev&m=113436943111935&w=…
but from my 5 emails only one was answered and none of the bugs was fixed.
Bero is the Ark Linux founder, architect, owner and I really doubt he would have time to do any serious maintenance or development work on qtparted in the future as well. At least this is what his track record proved: basically nothing changed since he is the maintainer.
i hadnt noticed that systemrescuecd is that old
to bad realy as i like the concept. maybe time to find out why the development stopped…
I have always simply used the install CD of the distro I’m installing to do my resizing. I thought all of the “user friendly” distros could do the resizing themselves during the install. Both Mandrake (back when it really was Mandrake) and Ubuntu have even offered to automatically use free space from my windows install. I’ve never had a problem just letting the installer do the resizing, although I’ve always manually decided how much space to take. To me, it seems like an uneccessary extra step to use knoppix to do the resizing.
I would assume anyone installing something that wouldn’t resize ntfs for you would already know how to get the space they need. Is there a class of users who wouldn’t know how to make room on their drive thinking about a gentoo stage 1 install?
The last (and only) time I tried qtparted, from SystemRescueCD, I lost my NTFS partition. Why? Apparently (as far as I can tell), qtparted (which uses ntfsresize) insists that the start and end of partitions be aligned with cylinder boundaries. My 2 existing NTFS partitons (as set up by the OEM), were not aligned on cylinder boundaries. The resizing here only shrinks you partition at the end, but does not move the start, but qtparted moved the partition start without moving the data, rendering the OS unable to boot.
I know the previous poster mentions that most problem are due to repartitioning, but I disagree that that is irrelevant. A working tool must take these sorts of things into account.
Partition Magic often complains about cylinder boundries, and once lost all the partitions on an important hard drive. I managed to recover the partitions using a hex editor and a lot of trial and error. Backing up the partition table before doing anything that will alter it is proabbly a good idea.
Yes, this is one of the known reliability problems of qtparted. Rarely it may also change the head count in the partition table and also fails to refuse resizing dynamic disks. Thankfully none results real data loss (all data is accessible from Linux but Windows can’t boot) and all case is recoverable without any data loss (including yours). These qtparted problems are known for 1.5 years and were communicated to three of its developers several times. Unfortunately nothing happened.
I didn’t write that “most problems are due to repartitioning”. I wrote that so far “all”. In numbers it’s about 100,000+ (partition resizing) versus 0 (ntfs resizing). The number is so high because the new disk geometry support code of the new 2.6 kernels fooled most partitioners last year and they consequently corrupted quite many partition tables: http://lwn.net/Articles/86835/ This has affected only a few percent of the users and most vendors fixed this problem very quickly.
I also wrote that the partition table manipulation is “irrelevant to NTFS” because filesystem resizers can’t do anything about these bugs because they don’t handle the partition table at all. Similar problems keep happenning in case of FAT32, ext2, ext3 and reiserfs too. These problems are clearly only partition table manipulation related in qtparted and they aren’t filesystem level bugs what many users incorrectly think.
a person i know allways refers to partition magic as partition panic…
something about if you dont do it right the first time, its better to start over from scratch then try to fix it or something.
still, i think he is used to working in office enviroments with server-stored user files and profiles.
I tried using partition magic to do this. What happend is it screwed up my install. Never again will I use partition magic. I heard about using Mandriva CD1 and that is the way I would do this for now on. Mandriva’s partition manager is easy to use and has a nice GUI.
if you will resize, use pclos – it has harddrake inside, a serios tool…qtparted sucks!
The easy way
1.) In windows, defrag your harddrive
2.) Insert Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) installation cd
3.) Reboot computer and begin the installation process
4.) Select yes when the partitioner asks if you want to resize the windows (ntfs or fat32) partition
5.) Finish installing Linux
6.) Reboot into your shiny new linux desktop
http://www.ubuntulinux.org