1 Topic by Hari Seldon

  • Hari Seldon
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Topic: Can I merge C partition with Unallocated partition

I had two 250GB hard drives set up as RAID 0, giving me a total of 465GB free space which we filled up in two years.
Just bought two new hard drives and set them up as RAID 0. Created one NTFS 700GB partition and left 250GB unallocated until I decide what to put on it - maybe Vista.
Intending to use the old hard drives as backup, I took all the data off of these and put them onto the new 700GB C drive. For some strange reason, moving 455GB of data from the old drives to the new drives used up just under 600GB, or just over 100GB more space.
This means I'm using up the 700GB space far faster than I expected. And now I wish I had made the C partition bigger.
On the two new RAID 0 drives, there is about 260GB of unallocated space, most of which I now want to add to the 700GB C drive.
This unallocated space hasn't been partitioned and as far as I know hasn't been formatted.

I downloaded and ran SystemRescueCd 0.3.7. I only found the unallocated space displayed, and I could not find a merge or JOIN button.

How can I merge 200GB of the unallocated space with the NTFS 700GB active partition (C drive)?

cool

Incremental Liberalism is change without informed consent.

2 Reply by class413

  • class413
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Re: Can I merge C partition with Unallocated partition

It seems that this large new drive uses a larger segment size to allocate space to the files, so if you have many small files it can lead to more wasted disk space. Anyway I think it's excessive to have 100+ GB waste space for 455 GB of data. Windows is perhaps bad system, but not sooooo bad lol

Please, check the drive with the windows tools (chkdsk /f) to find if there is any allocation error and fix it.
A good idea is to defragment it, altough it would be hard because of the small free space. If it is a data-only disk with just added data, this would be not necessary.

You can expand your partition to the unallocated disk space, if it is contiguous to your 700GB disk. It would be very long to move the beginning position to the partition, so don't try it.
In any case, keep your good old drives as backup until the operation finishes good! wink
Any partition work has some risk, even due to electrical supply problems.

And, first of all, read carefully the documentation, concerning resizing NTFS (do at least 3 reboots in windows before any other operation).
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/documentation.php

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

3 Reply by Hari Seldon (edited by Hari Seldon 2007-08-07 09:23:03)

  • Hari Seldon
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Re: Can I merge C partition with Unallocated partition

What do you mean by "a larger segment size"? When setting up both the first two RAID 0 drives and the second two new RAID 0 drives, I chose a 128 cluster size - thinking that would be better.
Yeah Windows might be for looooooosers  lol but then how would I play my games??

I did defragment and I did chkdisk /f as you suggested. Thanks - everything seems to be okay.

I think I found the reason why I lost over 100GB when transfering all my data from the two old drives (which were 10GB from being full) to the two new drives. I noticed when clicking on Properties for one of the large folders (Shareaza/Incomplete), that it says the 'Size' is 223GB but the 'Size on disk' is 74GB. I don't know how this happened, and I can only guess that as the drives nears filling up, it automatically starts compressing data without asking for permission. When this folder was copied to the two new drives, it arrived uncompressed. This is just a wild guess.

How can I expand the C partition to include most of the unallocated space?
Gparted does NOT display the active C partition. It does display the unallocated space as sdaa and sdab.  And it also displays the old drives D partition as sdac and sdad.
It gives me the two options of New and Info.

Does Gparted not work properly with Seagate SATAII drives in a RAID 0 configuration? I cannot find the main 700GB partition called the C drive, which I want to 'expand' into the unallocated space on the same drives.
Remember, I'm talking about two physical hard drives set up in a RAID 0 configuration. Each of these two new hard drives has 500GB which gives me 1TB - actually 960GB. I've put one 700GB partition on these two new RAID 0 drives and left 260GB unallocated. Now I want to take 200GB of this unallocated space and add it to the 700GB C: partition.

I'm new to this program, so I appreciate help from those of you experienced with it.

cool

Incremental Liberalism is change without informed consent.

4 Reply by class413

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Re: Can I merge C partition with Unallocated partition

You didn't mention which version of Gparted you used. Installed version in any other linux partition? LiveCD? Anyway, I would suggest a late LiveCD. The 3 latest versions (0.3.4-6, -7 and -8 have some differencies in hardware detection and boot-up).

Normally, the RAID configuration is done on the BIOS setup. Gparted displays all the partitions it sees. Gparted must detect the drive to be in order to work on the partitions.

You can try to see during boot-up how your RAID is detected.

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

5 Reply by Hari Seldon

  • Hari Seldon
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Re: Can I merge C partition with Unallocated partition

I downloaded and ran SystemRescueCd 0.3.7. So whatever version of GParted that comes with this latest stable package is what I have.
How do I get a LiveCD and what difference is there between the GParted version that comes with the latest LiveCD and the GParted version that comes with SystemRescueCd 0.3.7, which I just downloaded.

It displays (sees?) the unallocated space on the two new drives, but not the partitioned space (C: drive) on the same drives. It also displays the two old drives (D: drive).
If GParted is showing me the unallocated space on the two new drives, then it must see them. Why is it not showing me the partitioned space, which I want to expand, if it sees the drives?

The RAID configuration is done by pressing F10 before the computer boots up, but not inside the BIOS setup.
Inside the BIOS setup, RAID is enabled but not configured.
After pressing F10, the two (or more) discs can be configured, selecting: the actual drives, the RAID type (0,1, etc), and the cluster size (128).

I don't know what you mean by "You can try to see during boot-up how your RAID is detected.", and if you are talking about how my computer detects them or how GParted detects them.
If you're talking about how my computer detects them, I see it everytime the computer boots. It reports RAID detected, shows me the number of arrays (2), the total size of the arrays, and that they are healthy.

Thanks.

Incremental Liberalism is change without informed consent.