1 Topic by bonjonno (edited by bonjonno 2009-11-02 23:44:22)

  • bonjonno
  • New member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2009-10-31
  • Posts: 2

Topic: can an active boot partition (XP) be resized larger? SOLVED

I am a noobie. Just made the GParted Live disc 4.7-1 and fooled around on a backup hard drive that had an active partition ~48GB and the rest ~250GB various logical partitions. I think I am getting the hang of it. The active partition is loaded with XP Pro and quite a bit of data ~20GB altogether. I tried to resize it to 100GB. In GParted it appeared I was succesful. The machine rebooted into Windows, but in My Computer the C (boot) drive still shows only 48GB total. Oddly in disk management it shows the whole 100GB that GParted did and says healthy. But in effect I just removed that extra storage from the hard drive as far as windows is concerned. Is there anyone that can explain my error? The real fun was going back to GParted and resizing C down to what I guessed was its original size, and increasing my extended partition back to what it was. I thought this would severely mess up the boot drive. But it still boots just fine. That's my miracle for today. All this is prep work for next week when I try to install Windows 7 Pro on an XP system and have dual boot capability. Thanks for any input.

2 Reply by class413

  • class413
  • Moderator
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2007-05-25
  • Posts: 2,376

Re: can an active boot partition (XP) be resized larger? SOLVED

It occurs sometimes: the partition grows but the filesystem inside remains the same. A manner to proceed would really to resize back to the original size and retry. Another idea is to proceed in two steps: e.g. from 40GB to 70, reboot 2 times, and next step from 70GB to 100.

Another tip: use the "check" function on that partition, from GParted.

(Moved to the live media section)

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

3 Reply by bonjonno

  • bonjonno
  • New member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2009-10-31
  • Posts: 2

Re: can an active boot partition (XP) be resized larger? SOLVED

thanks. after a couple more tries I got it to work.

4 Reply by class413

  • class413
  • Moderator
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2007-05-25
  • Posts: 2,376

Re: can an active boot partition (XP) be resized larger? SOLVED

Defragmenting well the partition before resize, usually helps to prevent some unwanted effects.
Officially it isn't necessary to defragment, but experience shows that it helps.

So, you can edit your first post to add [SOLVED] to the subject line
smile

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