1 Topic by ronbaby

  • ronbaby
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Topic: Can't copy partition to USB drive(s)

I have the GParted LiveCD (0.13.0-3) and I've booted that and I'm trying to just simply copy a fat32 partition from the local hard drive onto an attached USB drive.  (I've tried copying to both a thumb drive and also to an external powered HDD USB drive and neither one is working for me.)

Basically, I'm just doing what various instructions that I found lying around the net tell me to do, i.e. click to select the input partition, then click on "Copy", and then switch the other drive and click on the unallocated space (which is plenty big) and then _supposedly_ I'll see either an un-grayed-out "Paste" in the top menu bar or else I'll be able to right click on the empty space, thus bringing up a menu of things I can do with that space, and then on that menu there should be a non-grayed-out "Paste" option.

Anyway, in both the top menu bar and in the right-click drop down menu, the "Paste" option is always greyed-out.

What can I possibly be doing wrong?  I mean this isn't, you know, like rocket surgery or anything.  I just can't figure out where I am messing up.  Does GParted not allow copying of partitions to USB drives?

Any enlightenment would be appreciated.


P.S.  I've successfully used GParted for other stuff, e.g. creating partitions on otherwise blank USB drives and regular hard drives.  It's a great package.   It will be even greater if I can get it to do this new thing I'm trying to do with it.

2 Reply by gedakc

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Re: Can't copy partition to USB drive(s)

How large is the source partition?
How much contiguous unallocated space is available on the USB drive?

Is the source partition larger than the unallocated space on the USB drive?
If so that might be the reason why the Paste option is greyed-out.

3 Reply by ronbaby

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Re: Can't copy partition to USB drive(s)

Hummm... well, the internal (IDE) and the eternal (USB) drives are real real close in size, but...

The internal drive itself is 58,633,344 sectors, with one partition of size 58,633,281 sectors.

I wanted to copy that one partition into the unallocated space on the USB drive, which apparently
consists of exactly 58,631,231 sectors (which is apparently just slightly NOT big enough).

So, um, yea.  You are correct that there is not quite enough space on the external USB to copy the original partition to, HOWEVER...

I _thought_ that this was part of the idea... part of the functionality of GParted... i.e. that it could copy a partition from one place to another WHILE DOWNSIZING IT, as long as the target partition had enough space to hold all of the actual files and other allocated space contained in the original (source) partition.  No?

My source partition is about 30GB large (and formatted to FAT32 if that makes any difference), however out of that 30GB, only about 1/2 of one GB is actually used/allocated.

So I am still perplexed as to why I should not be able to copy from my input partition to my output partition.  I mean I saw/read some instructions about using GParted to copy partitions, and among those were some instructions saying that you could just click on the right-hand edge of the visual representation of a target partition, and then, while holding the mouse button down, you could move that left or right to resize the target partition pretty much to your heart's desire BEFORE actually starting the partition copy operation.  If it is indeed possible to do that with Gparted, then why can't I get to a point where I can do that in this case?

4 Reply by gedakc

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Re: Can't copy partition to USB drive(s)

For many file systems, GParted does a sector by sector copy and this is the reason why there must be at least as much unallocated space on the destination drive.  The situation of the destination copy being smaller than the source partition is supported for xfs file systems only and uses the xfsdump command instead of a sector by sector copy.  See GParted features note #3.

Since the size of the two devices is very close, you could work around the problem by first shrinking the source partition by a small amount (perhaps a few MB), and then copy the partition.