1 Topic by mdsh

  • mdsh
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Topic: GParted failed to resize partitions

I hope this is the correct forum for this type of issue:

I needed to repartition a work Windows XP laptop.
It has:
* c: as primary partition 1 (hda1)
* an extended partition as primary partition 2 (hda2)
* d: as the first partition in the extended partition (hda5)

I downloaded GParted live 0.4.5-2 and booted that on this HP Compaq 2510p
I set GParted to:
* shrink hda5 and move it towards the end of the disk by adding 8192MB of free space before it
* shrink hda2 and moved it towards the end of the disk by dragging the left hand edge until it abutted hda5
* grow hda1 by dragging the right hand edge to the right until it abutted the start of hda2

I applied all the changes, and:
* The shrink and move of hda5 went fine.
* The shring and move of hda2 was ok, except the start did not move as far as GParted asked it to and there is about 8MB of free space at the hda2 before hda5 starts.
* This meant that hda1 could not be expanded as far as GParted expected. The final message being "libparted messages  ( INFO ) Can't have overlapping partitions."

No harm done. After the error and GParted had read the new actual positions of the partitions I just dragged the right hand of hda1 to meet the actual new position of hda2 and the resize went through ok.

Did I do something wrong, or make wrong assumptions, or did the GParted GUI do something wrong.

I have the gparted_details.htm from the first pass that went wrong if you're interested.

2 Reply by class413

  • class413
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Re: GParted failed to resize partitions

* The shring and move of hda2 was ok, except the start did not move as far as GParted asked it to and there is about 8MB of free space at the hda2 before hda5 starts.

These 8 MB are obviously a gap because the partition limits are often aligned to the cylinder limits. "Cylinders" in the hard drive internals are blocks of 255x63 sectors of 512 bytes (you can find info about this in Wikipedia). It seems that windows like to have its partitions aligned this manner. GParted can override this, but it is safer to keep the default setting (unless you have some special purpose for this).

Ovelapping partitions means that the end sector of a partition is marked after the start sector of the next partition. There 8 MB are about 16000 sectors.

Finally, although GParted can schedule and perform a long series of operations, we advice to proceed step by step, in order to have a better control on the results, especially for windows partitions.

I understand that you have no problem with your partitions. I think that the issue was just what I noted above.

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