1 Topic by NiJo

  • NiJo
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  • Registered: 2009-02-24
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Topic: [closed] Speeding up partition moves by shrink / move / expand

Thank you for this wonderfull application and the live CD. Some days ago I used it to move a nearly empty partiton. As it was already running (mostly moving empty sectors) I had time to think about a simple speed up I should have done by hand:

1) Shrink the partition to minimum size
2) Move this small partition (No empty sectors copied around!)
3) Expand to planned size

I suggest that parted should ask to execute these three steps instead of the direct move if a partition is less than 80% full. In these cases the time for additional steps (e. g. resize2fs and fschk) should be lower than moving a lot of empty sectors. The current dialog provides all required information (final start for step 2, final end for step 3).

As the suggested feature uses established functionality it should be simple to implement. Basically it is just a GUI thing. I'm not holding my breath for this "nice to have" functionality.

Johannes Nieß

2 Reply by stormhead

  • stormhead
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  • Registered: 2008-07-31
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Re: [closed] Speeding up partition moves by shrink / move / expand

Hi!

The problem with this is that it requires the file system to be in a definitiely clean state - otherwise, the resize operations (especially shrinking) would destroy data. While this is relatively easy to ensure for the typical Linux file systems (GParted brings the tools required to check and fix them with it on the Live media), it is not so easy for third-parts file systems like NTFS: For these file systems, you often need to boot the "native" operating system for these file systems and perform some magic there.
In addition to this, even some of the Linux file systems can not be moved this way, since there is no known way to shrink them (jfs / XFS / Reiser4) - and to enlarge them, they need to be mounted, and growing must be done on-line (jfs / XFS). Depending on your machine, this is not a very clever idea - maybe you perform the resize operations on a system with very little RAM (and modern file systems can consume huge amounts of memory).
For other file systems (from the Macintiosh world), GParted is unable to grow them.

As a result, your approach to resizing would be limited to ext2/3/4, ReiserFS, the FAT variants - and eventually NTFS, if the file system is defintiely clean (however, most resizing problems you read about in the forums are NTFS-related...). I don't know if it would be a good idea to add a feature with an "exception list" this large (I think I wouldn't do it as long as the underlying problems mentioned above are not solved) - but I think we should let the developers decide this.

3 Reply by gedakc

  • gedakc
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  • Registered: 2007-11-30
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Re: [closed] Speeding up partition moves by shrink / move / expand

The response by stormhead is well thought out.

There is always some risk when editing partitions, and hence the less a partition is modified, the less chance there is for data loss.