1 Topic by frank.zappa77

  • frank.zappa77
  • New member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2009-03-24
  • Posts: 1

Topic: Resizing Fragmented Partition Question - Live CD

I've been using GParted for a while and whenever I have to resize an NTFS partition, I always make sure to defragment it first. My first question is, if I tried to resize a partition, but the part that I wanted to resize contained data, what would GParted do?
If I'm not making sense, I'll try to use a diagram:
1 = presence of data; 0 = no data
If this is my HD (1 partition)

[101011101101000000000001]

and I want to create 2 partitions so that it looks like: (2 partitions)

[10101110110100] [0000000001]<-- will this '1' be detected and moved to the first partition?

Will GParted detect that there's data at the end of partition and move it within the region ( or borders) of the first partition?

I remember one time GParted showed there was about 500MB of unformatted space before my recovery partition so I extended that onto my recovery partition. In the end, the partition still worked; it would boot and I even used it after that, but it took a long time to extend it. A windows came up and showed how much data had been moved and it took an hour to move all that data. Can someone explain why the data had to be moved? Couldn't the partitions have just been merged and the recovery partition have 500MB of empty data at the beginning? Was GParted even moving the rest of the data to the 'front' of the partition or was it doing something else?

Just some questions that I've been curious about for a while - Thanks.
Oh and if it matters, I'm referring to the Live CD.

2 Reply by class413

  • class413
  • Moderator
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2007-05-25
  • Posts: 2,376

Re: Resizing Fragmented Partition Question - Live CD

GParted is able to relocate data. However, the more fragmented is the file system, the more complicated is the resizing operation. So, there is bigger risk to fail. Furthermore, in some cases of heavily fragmented partitions, the ntfsresize tool that performs this operation refuses to proceed.

In general, it is better to avoid modifying such recovery partitions, because in some cases we could loose the recovery possibility.

I don't know if I understand well  the last issue. Expanding a partition, especially from the beginning (left side in the GParted graph) means that new file/metadata tables have to be built and updated, and all this as safely as possible. It can be quite long to do.

(Moved to the live media section)

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***