Quick Repartitioning Help

[Danoff]

So I need to repartition my drive and I'd like to do it without formatting. What (free or shareware) software should I use?

Edit: I'm running Win2K.

 

[skip0110]

Do you mean resizing partitions? If you're not afraid of the command line, and don't mind reading a bit of documentation, parted is both fast and reliable. http://paud.sourceforge.net/

 

[Danoff]

Yea, I meant resizing partitions - sorry about that. I'll check into that. I tried downloading partition magic but it doesn't support large hard disks.


Edit: It looks like that utility is for linux only. Is that the case? I'd like to do this in windows.

 

[skip0110]

You download the floppy disk image, write it to a floppy (using the rawrite tool), boot to the floppy disk and the repartition. So although the floppy contains Linux, it should resize your Windows partitions just fine.

(Partiton Magic also works at boot time; you can't resize a partition if it is being used.)

 

[Danoff]

Give me a hint.

What commands should I use?

ReiserFS? Is fat32 the same as ext3?

I'm going to screw up my hard disk with this thing, I'm almost certain of it.

 

[skip0110]

After it's booted form the floppy, type

parted

to enter the program. Then

print

will display the current partitions. Like this:

(parted) print
Disk geometry for /dev/hda: 0.000-2445.679 megabytes
Disk label type: msdos
Minor    Start       End     Type      Filesystem  Flags
1          0.031    945.000  primary   FAT         boot, lba
2        945.000   2358.562  primary   ext2
3       2358.562   2445.187  primary   linux-swap

Then you can type

resize 2

to resize parition 2 for example. Remeber 1 gig = 1024, so 3 gig = 3*1024. This might be helpful as well: http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/manual/html_mono/parted.html

You can ignore all that ext3/ReiserFS stuff (fat32 is different)...the only command you will be interested in is resize. You can make partitions with the tool too, but I think you'll find that easier to do in Windows.

EDIT: Oh yes, the quit command might be useful as well....

 

[Danoff]

Ok, that looks easy enough. 2 questions.

How come rawrite isn't working. I put both rawrite and the image file on my D drive.

I type rawrite and it says

"Enter source file name: "

I say

"paud-1.0.4.img"

It says, no such file could be found. I tried a full path, I tried putting it in single quotes, nothing seems to be working. The file is right there.

The second thing is. I assume this is going to take a few steps.

If I took your example and said resize 2 so that it ended at 2000 instead of 2358 it would do that but leave 358 in a new partition? Or would it resize the next partion to have 358 more space? If it does that, does it go through the partition and find free space to do that with or does it just draw a line in the sand saying all data before this part now gets shifted to the other partion - in otherwords screwing up the data.

I imagine that all of this is written in the documentation that I can't get out of the image file. Either that or its at the link you posted, so I'll go there now.

 

[Danoff]

I think rawrite just destroyed my floppy. I thought the filename might be a problem so I renamed paud-1.0.4.img to a file called tmpfile


Then I ran rawrite and gave it the tmpfile name.

This time it asked me what drive I wanted to write to. I said "a:"

It came back and said "attempting to write across 64k boundary" or something like that and gave me the command prompt back. Now my computer doesn't recognize the floppy disk when I try to access it.

Toast.

 

[skip0110]

Ok, that looks easy enough. 2 questions.

How come rawrite isn't working. I put both rawrite and the image file on my D drive.

I type rawrite and it says

"Enter source file name: "

I say

"paud-1.0.4.img"

It says, no such file could be found. I tried a full path, I tried putting it in single quotes, nothing seems to be working. The file is right there.

rawrite ia a mysterious program. I don't know what is the exact problem, but you might want to try these things:
1) Make sure you use the backslash (\) in the path and take all the weird characters out of the paud filename...call it test.img for example.
2) Put rawrite and paud in the same directory (Say D:\).
or maybe
3) Try to specify the file on the command line, like

rawrite -f D:\test.img -d A:

EDIT: Ok... so it toasted your floppy...I dont know what the deal is...but a reformat ought to fix the floppy...

The second thing is. I assume this is going to take a few steps.

If I took your example and said resize 2 so that it ended at 2000 instead of 2358 it would do that but leave 358 in a new partition? Or would it resize the next partion to have 358 more space? If it does that, does it go through the partition and find free space to do that with or does it just draw a line in the sand saying all data before this part now gets shifted to the other partion - in otherwords screwing up the data.

With the situation you suggested, the 358 will be "free space"--unpartitioned space.

The program is clever and rearranges your data within the partition so that it will appear that it was a smaller disk all along. (I think Windows gave me a warning the first time I booted up after resizing, but this was just informational and only occured once.) Just be sure that the data you have will fit into the smaller partiton.

 

[Danoff]

EDIT: Ok... so it toasted your floppy...I dont know what the deal is...but a reformat ought to fix the floppy...

It won't let me format the floppy. It doesn't even recognize it anymore when I put it in the drive. I don't know how that happened but hey, floppies are cheap.

Thanks for your help skip. I don't think I'm going to keep trying this tonight - maybe tomorrow.

 

[Danoff]

I have solved my hard disk problems.

I figured out a way to not have to resize my C drive.

My problem has been that the swapfile and internet caches often push me to the end of my C:\ partition. The result is pretty bad for most applications.

However,

I managed to move my swapfile to another partition and configure mozilla such that it no longer uses the C drive for temporary storage (that was hard, I had to reinstall mozilla because it just wouldn't listen to me).

So now my c drive stays at a nice constant 247 mb free and I still have a 1 GB swapfile and lots of temporary internet storage. Life is good again.

 

[LoudMusic]

Wow ... it's been a while since I've had to deal with that.

The way I configure computers now is to make an 8GB to 10GB 'system' partition and then all the rest to data. That should be more than enough space for the OS and applications, plus user directory settings. Then when it comes time to blast the install and start over I don't have to worry about copying the data to another computer first - I can just deal with the system partition.

 

[Danoff]

The way I configure computers now is to make an 8GB to 10GB 'system' partition and then all the rest to data. That should be more than enough space for the OS and applications, plus user directory settings. Then when it comes time to blast the install and start over I don't have to worry about copying the data to another computer first - I can just deal with the system partition.

That's basically the way I have my computer configured. But I assembled this a while back and stupidly thought that 2.5 BG was sufficient for the OS. Win2K has grown on me and so I had to start moving things off the C drive. 250 mb in the OS partition should last me until I get another computer though (0.5-1 year).

 

[LoudMusic]

*GASP*

2.5GB for the system partition? No no no ... WINDOWS takes up that much space, not including all your apps and user settings (:

I honestly don't remember if it was possible with 2000, but in XP you can mount a new drive as a directory (folder) in the structure of an existing drive, or file system. So you could theoretically throw in a new drive, just some cheapo that you pick up from a friend, and move your "/program files" directory to it. Just a thought.

 

[Danoff]

2.5GB for the system partition? No no no ... WINDOWS takes up that much space, not including all your apps and user settings (:

I honestly don't remember if it was possible with 2000, but in XP you can mount a new drive as a directory (folder) in the structure of an existing drive, or file system. So you could theoretically throw in a new drive, just some cheapo that you pick up from a friend, and move your "/program files" directory to it. Just a thought.
Today 8:11 PM

I don't think I explained that well. Here's my partition setup (C and D are on one physical HD, E and F are on another)

Drive C Windows 2000 2.5gB
Drive D Apps/Programs/SwapFile 40ishgB
Drive E Data - Backup Etc. 20gB
Drive F Network Data - Public 4 gB

So literally the only thing on the C drive was the windows installation, drivers, and whatever else absolutely HAD to go with windows. All the software that I use is installed on another drive. That way I don't even have to erase that before I wipe windows. I can still go into the app directories and grab things (like savegame files and configuration files) after windows has already died.

It's the uber-paranoid-of-windows-dying configuration.


By the way, I've installed win2k on a 250mb HD. It was a little tight, but I made it happen. I wouldn't want to run something like that for very long, but it worked for a test.

 

[LoudMusic]

Oh, so you're not in too bad of shape. Personally I don't like to have too many partitions. And if you reinstall Windows you have to reinstall most apps. I essentially run my computer as if it had one partition, but have another one for personal files.

 

[Danoff]

Oh, so you're not in too bad of shape. Personally I don't like to have too many partitions. And if you reinstall Windows you have to reinstall most apps. I essentially run my computer as if it had one partition, but have another one for personal files.

I've had my computer like this for 6 or 7 years now (swapping in and out new hard drives and other computer components). Earlier I had win98 installed like this.

I plan to switch to winXP soon. When I do that I might change my configuration. There are things I like about it still though. For example, if windows died on me all of the sudden and I couldn't get it working again. I wouldn't have to try to mount my drive under another windows system to get data out of the program directories. All I'd have to do is wipe the C:, put windows back on and then I could go through and get what I wanted out of my programs directories. In the end I would have to wipe most of the D: and start over with the programs, but at least I wouldn't have lost any data.

I might do it your way when I switch to XP thought because I hate trying to guess how much space windows is going to balloon to over the next 5 years or so.

 

[LoudMusic]

Well the nice thing is disk space has gotten pretty cheap. You can get hard drives now for something like $0.75 per gigabyte. And they're super fast too.