1 Topic by miki2

  • miki2
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Topic: Increase Boot partition

Hello everyone,

For what it's worth, this is my first post on this forum.

I’ve been resizing my hard drive, Western Digital 80GB, into 4 partitions, using GParted version 3.4.11. Partitions Hda5, Hda6 and Hda7 were resized successfully but not Partition Hda1 which is the boot partition. There was an error message that advised me that the “disk has at least one bad sector “.

The solution to this problem is similar to some of the posts on this forum : namely, “…run chkdsk /f /r  on Windows and reboot twice. Then you can resize NTFS safely by additionally using the – bad--sectors option of ntfsresize. “

I’ve followed these instructions several times. No joy.

I then searched this forum and tried a couple of suggestions as follows:

1) I downloaded the Western Digital Data Lifeguard Diagnostics and ran it. It found bad sectors but successfully repaired them.

2) I then ran ntfsfix /… and this process was also OK.

However, I still cannot enlarge Hda1 as the bad sector error message is still there.

I would like to post a screenshot but I don’t know how (sorry), so this is what it looks like:

PARTITION      FILE SYSTEM        SIZE            USED            UNUSED     FLAGS

/dev/hda1        ntfs                     7.82GB           -                    -              boot
/dev/hda2        extended            66.70GB           -                    -              lba
unallocated      unallocated         17.69GB           -                     -
/dev/hda5        ntfs                    37.24GB         3.24GB          34.00GB
/dev/hda6        ntfs                    10.79GB         3.01GB            7.77GB
/dev/hda7        ntfs                 1004.03MiB    171.04MiB        832.99MiB
unallocated      unallocated            7.84MiB

Please note that the used GB in Hda1 is not shown by GParted for whatever reason. This should be about 6.82GB.

The ultimate objective is to increase the size of Hda1 by the unallocated 17.69GB.

I use WINDOWS XP PRO SP3 . Am I correct to assume that Disk Management will not allow me to extend the boot partition ?   

Thank you in advance to all who may be able to assist.

miki2

2 Reply by class413

  • class413
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Re: Increase Boot partition

Before trying to expand /dev/hda1, you have to shrink the extended partition /dev/hda2 because the unallocated space is locate into that partition. So the unallocated space will be just next to the primary partition.

If the bad sector error persists, try to use any newer version. Latest version for the livecd is 0.3.7-7.

(Topic moved to the live media section.)

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

3 Reply by miki2

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Re: Increase Boot partition

Thank you for your response. Since my last post, I"ve downloaded and tried the newest version 0.3.7-7, with the same outcome.

I will now follow your suggestion and shrink the extended partition. Before I do, could you please clarify this for me. Do I shrink dev/hda2 by 17.69GB, which is the amount of unallocated space ?

4 Reply by class413

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Re: Increase Boot partition

You can shrink the extended partition by all the unallocated space, i.e. 17.69GB. You can't expand /dev/hda1 without doing this. Otherwise the unallocated space will belong to the extended partition.

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

5 Reply by miki2

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Re: Increase Boot partition

Thank you.

The yellow triangle still appears next to /dev/hda1, with the warning that