1 Topic by Drithyin

  • Drithyin
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Topic: Partition resizing problem, shrinking FAT32 with GParted

I am installing Ubuntu as a second OS on a machine already running Windows XP. I have 2 hard disks. Currently, the master harddrive (120gb) is one large FAT32 partition with XP on it. (FAT32 instead of NTFS because it was an upgrade instal from Win98 and I was too lazy at the time to fresh format the whole thing)
My second harddrive is a ful 240gb partition of Ext3, which will eventually be my /home partition. I also have a program that lets Windows XP read and write to Ext2/3 file systems, so it will also be shared storage.

My problem comes in when I try to shrink my FAT32 partition. I want to cut it to half (approx 55-60% free space) and make the other half my Ubuntu partition, with the linux swap on the end.

So, I run GParted (from the Ubuntu Live CD) and tell it to resize the primary FAT32 partition to 60gbs, which leaves around 8gbs or so of free space left in the FAT32 partition, and the rest of the drive unallocated.

When I attempt to do this, it passes the first file system test, but when it calls libparted, I get the following error.

File system is reporting the free space as 0 clusters, not 1980483 clusters.



Disk Defrag and scandisk did nothing to remedy my woes.

Desperate for help.

2 Reply by Drithyin

  • Drithyin
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Re: Partition resizing problem, shrinking FAT32 with GParted

Update: I tried copying my entire FAT32 partition to my secondary drive and sizing it there, on the off chance that there was an issue with the hardware. Negative. The copy was also giving the same error.

I'm at a loss on this.

3 Reply by LarryT

  • LarryT
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Re: Partition resizing problem, shrinking FAT32 with GParted

Drithyin wrote:

So, I run GParted (from the Ubuntu Live CD) and tell it to resize the primary FAT32 partition to 60gbs, which leaves around 8gbs or so of free space left in the FAT32 partition, and the rest of the drive unallocated.

Here was your error ! Ubuntu contains a bugged GParted version (0.2.5).
I told them many times but they seem to don't care of their end-users.
Maybe you could post on the ubuntu forum and ask them to take you out of the hole they push you into :-p

No other clue sad

Larry
GParted-project Admin
Former GParted-LiveCD maintainer (2007)