1 Topic by MaZderMind

  • MaZderMind
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Topic: [closed] Resize partition without copying it's content

Hi there
Just used GParded LiveCD to resize my NTFS Data-Disk forward into a free area of my HD. It took 1:45 hrs.
It's just a Data-Disk with one Primary NTFS-Partition (e.g. no boot-sectors or so), so i didn't see the sense of moving 200GiBs of data around, if one could instead just add the space in front of the partition. My question is: is that possible to enlarge a non-boot partition forward without copying/moving all of it's contents?

Peter

2 Reply by gedakc

  • gedakc
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Re: [closed] Resize partition without copying it's content

To my knowledge, it is not possible to simply add space to the beginning of a file system.  This is due to the structure of file systems and the meta data that define the file system.  As such, growing a file system to the left requires that the file system first be moved to the left, and then expanded in size to the right.

3 Reply by stormhead

  • stormhead
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Re: [closed] Resize partition without copying it's content

Hi!

To be more precise, I think that it should be possible to write file system resizing algorithms that expand file systems to the left (just as gedakc mentioned, this would require moving and re-calculating loadfs of metadata that is used to manage the space on the hard drive as well as the data stored on it).
But once you already have algorithms to move a partition, and other ones to grow the partition to the right, the task of growing a partition to the left can be split into the two tasks "move partition to the left" and "grow partition to the right" - which eliminates the need for new complex algorithms, thus lowering the required efforts for code maintenance and reducing the risk of introducing new bugs.