Hello Gparted brethren,
I can't believe this thing is still biting people, but I've got teeth marks all over my A$$ from trying to get my son's XP volume moved from a 40G partition over. I've read as much as I could and I still haven't found a clear work-around.
What I am trying to do is add a lager hd to my son's computer that he has outgrown the windows partition on. The drive is presently partitioned as follows:
sda
sda1 - 40G Primary with XP
sda5 - 2G swap
sda6 - 20G /
sda7 - 53G /home
What I am trying to do is install a new 250G drive. The plan is to install the new drive as hd0 and then copy the 40G primary to the new drive and then grow it to 210G leaving roughly 30G unpartitioned at the end for whatever.
Upon attempting the copy with gparted (0.52-9) the copy fails with an error saying that sda1 has a bad sector and that you need to boot into windows, run chkdsk /r (implies /f), reboot TWICE, and then the partition can be resized using the ntfsresize '--bad-sector' option. So far following that advise has hasn't produced any results. The problem being -- no matter how many times you run chkdsk and confirmed there are NO problem with bad sectors in windows, the yellow triangle stays next to the partitions in gparted and ... you're screwed.
As a test, I decided to use good old 'dd' to copy the partition which I then planned on resizing after the XP volume had been copied from sdb to sda. To address the issue of possible sector problems in the original XP volume, dd was run to pad any sectors with '0's if an error was found. The cli used was:
dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=/dev/sda1 bs=4K conv=noerror,sync
The copy/duplication goes fine and I have a working copy of the XP install on the new drive with 200G of unallocated space at the end. When I open/boot gparted to grow the XP partition, I am completely shocked to see that same darn yellow-triangle next to the 'new' partition on the 'new' drive. The kicker is there are NO sector errors within the new XP volume. The physical media is fine. As mentioned before, even if there were a plausible sector or two that could not be copied, the sector would be null padded and should no result in gparted flagging it as a bad sector.
Just thinking out loud, there has to be some type of test that can be done to confirm or eliminate perceived bad sectors in the event of a non-blank $BADCLUS. As it sits now, just as before, gparted dies when it attempts to resize the new partition with ntfsresize complaining about the same bad sectors within the new XP volume. I swear MS must a added this 'feature' during one of the recent updates.
I notice the last post here is 5/25, has there been any progress or new work-arounds found in the past month? Ho have others handled this situation and been able to resize the partition in light of the flagged bad sectors. I'm open to any new ideas. Whatever it is I do, I can't risk botching my son's Counter-Strike Steam install -- heaven forbid 