1 Topic by tomektomula

  • tomektomula
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Topic: how does moving a partition work, chance of data corruption

my partitions look something like this:
EFI--UNALLOCATED SPACE--BTRFS LINUX--UNALLOCATED SPACE--SWAP

i need to move my linux to the left, so it's next to efi, and the unallocated space will merge. im not scared of breaking grub since i can fix it, i dont have any chance of power outage, so what is the chance of data corruption while moving, and why would data corruption occur?
I want it to look like that:
EFI--BTRFS LINUX--UNALLOCATED SPACE (merged from before)--SWAP
I can do that right now, since I've already got gparted liveusb ready, but knowing that my data can SOMEHOW corrupt (even if preventing power outage) is scary.
I also have a lot of free, unallocated space, my laptop doesn't overheat, and basically it wouldn't just turn off.

2 Reply by mfleetwo

  • mfleetwo
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Re: how does moving a partition work, chance of data corruption

GParted moves partitions by block copying the partition contents to the new location (for most partition content including for BTRFS').

There is a very low chance of corruption while moving a partition, however hard drives fail for all sorts of reasons.  You should always have a backup of data you care about, whether or not you are about to use GParted to move it.

3 Reply by mfleetwo

  • mfleetwo
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Re: how does moving a partition work, chance of data corruption

And here's a war story from of a GParted partition move failing because the the USB link hung.
* [Solved] Error during partition resize

(USB is the most unreliable way possible to connect hard drives to computers).