1 Topic by Jean-Pierre Boumbastique (edited by gedakc 2016-05-04 22:23:16)

  • Jean-Pierre Boumbastique
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Topic: [closed] Merge partitions, control cluster size

Have tried other partition tools, Gparted has the best combination of power, intuitive and friendly GUI, and price. of course.

Additional features I would love to see are the ability to merge partitions, and better control over allocation unit size. Better still, the ability to resize allocation units on an existing partition without data loss.

As far as I am concerned, Gparted would then be complete, and it would be the only complete GPL partition tool.

Added January 15:

Ability to set 'active' flag on partitions. It turns out that XP will not consider a partition without an active flag to be even bootable. So, two flags must be set: boot, and active. When Gparted copies an active partition, it does not set the active flag of the copy, and you cannot boot XP from it, even though the copy is perfect.

2 Reply by stormhead

  • stormhead
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Re: [closed] Merge partitions, control cluster size

Hi!

I don't think that "merging" partitions belongs into a tool like GParted - for one simple reason: What if you have two partitions that contain files with identical path and file names (e.g. two Windows or Linux installations on the same hard drive)? In this case, you need a way to have a look at the files, so you're able to decide which one to keep, which could easily lead to including an office suite, multimedis player, PDF reader, image viewer and so on on the LiveCD, growing the CD far beyond its intended use.
In addition to this, if you merge partitions using different file systems, you either have to trash some of the metadata on the "source" partition (like ownerships, ACLs or POSIX permissions on a ext3 or NTFS partition that is to be merge with a FAT32 partition, where the remaining partition shall be FAT32) or create them from scratch (if the merged partition will be NTFS or any Linux file system) - which can easily cause problems after conversion (a Linux system uses the POSIX file permissions to determine if it is executable or not, while Windows relies on the file name alone! The file name will be preserved during merging, while the permissions will likely be abandoned...)

3 Reply by class413

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Re: [closed] Merge partitions, control cluster size

About flags, copying the flags could lead to have two "identical" bootable active partitions on a system. However, just one of them must be active. How the system would boot?

At the present state GParted is a very special tool, intended for rather advanced manipulations. There are many details that a system manager must be able to have under control, avoiding any "automatic" solutions. This is valid for the professional systems, of course, nevertheless even today's home systems tend to be very complex too.

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

4 Reply by Ronholla

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Re: [closed] Merge partitions, control cluster size

Controlling destination cluster/allocation unit size is precisely the feature I need.  Merging partitions might be limited to "sane" requests(same or at least compatible file systems) with prompting (overwrite yes/no/all or newer/older only) for duplicates. A GParted user should ALREADY know or suspect the ramifications of merging heterogeneous partitions but be denied obviously incompatible/insane requests.

5 Reply by mariajones

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Re: [closed] Merge partitions, control cluster size

HI friends,
                  I read your comment. I think your direction is wrong.  I know that the Win Xp bootable CD to merge the partition but they are very risky. You should be trying different software that merge the drive without data loses as like Partition  magic etc.
thank you..

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