How can I easily move some space from NTFS to ext3 partition?

warnec · 2009-10-23 18:29:17

I am starting to run out of free space in my / directory. I've got home and / on separate partitions (sda7 and sda8, respectively) and would liek to subtract ~5GB of space from my NTFS 50GB partition (sda5) and move it to sda7. is it possible without losing any data?

[warnec@chakra ~]$ sudo fdisk -lu

Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders, total 625142448 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000001

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *          63    42078959    21039448+   7  HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2        42079084   625121279   291521098    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5        42079085   147072239    52496577+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda6       147072303   594004319   223466008+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda7       594019503   614984264    10482381   83  Linux
/dev/sda8       614984328   621330001     3172837   83  Linux
/dev/sda9       621330003   625121279     1895638+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
[warnec@chakra ~]$

.:B:. · 2009-10-23 18:33:25

It is, but nevertheless common sense has it a back up would be in order .

warnec · 2009-10-23 18:34:07

nm. I did some info myself and it seems like what I need:

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

At first I'll shrink the 50GB partition from Windows XP (there is a program for that, but don't remember it name) and then I hope to enlarge / with the free space I'll get from WinXP.

warnec · 2009-10-23 18:42:47

One more thing - AFAIR, I tried to do that once some time ago (don't really remember it now) and it worked fine, but after the whole process after booting Linux fsck came up saying it needs to repair something. Don't really remember. Anyway, it said that automatic repair isn't possible and gave me a propt like this (similar, am not sure after all that time has passed):

"Sector 0000001 is broken, you want to repair it? [Y/n]"

after saying "Y" there was:

"Sector 0000002 is broken, you want to repair it? [Y/n]"

and so on. You get it. I held Y for something like 20mins, and without any way of knowing how many sectors were left, I wanted to put a weight on "Y" key and go to sleep. But I was afraid that at the end there would be a prompt like "This will erase all your data, are you sure you want to continue?" and was afraid to leave this.

I decided to reinstall then, and now I want to never have to do this again.

PS.: This may be because I did this with Pragon Partition Manager (the WinXP program) and not Gparted.

Last edited by warnec (2009-10-23 18:45:09)

grey · 2009-10-23 18:52:49

ntfsresize (the name of the program). But you don't really need to know that - gparted will invoke it automatically when you resize the partition. I've used this procedure a lot, and it has worked n-1 times. The one time it didn't was when I tried to move the beginning of the ntfs partition instead of its end, but I have no idea if that was related to the failure or not.
Also: XP will perform a disk check when you try to boot it after the resizing, and I read somewhere that you should boot it twice before you touch its partition again.
And of course: back up.

grey · 2009-10-23 18:55:41

That was a cross post. For what it's worth: I have never had a problem resizing an ext2/3 partition with gparted.

graysky · 2009-10-23 20:06:08

+1 for gparted, you may need to be patient though. Depending on the size and speed of the hdd this can take a LONG time. 20-30 h.

warnec · 2009-10-23 21:29:14

graysky wrote:

20-30 h.

ZOMG.

I used KDE Partition Manager LiveCD, but it seems like it wasn't really up to the task. (See last comment on kde-apps)

Will try GParted later. Thanks for help.

grey · 2009-10-23 21:53:36

From my experience it should be closer to 2-3 minutes. It probably depends on how full the NTFS partition is and how much data needs to be moved. Come to think of it, maybe defragmenting it before you shrink it is a good idea.

Arch Linux

#1 2009-10-23 18:29:17

How can I easily move some space from NTFS to ext3 partition?

#2 2009-10-23 18:33:25

Re: How can I easily move some space from NTFS to ext3 partition?

#3 2009-10-23 18:34:07

Re: How can I easily move some space from NTFS to ext3 partition?

#4 2009-10-23 18:42:47

Re: How can I easily move some space from NTFS to ext3 partition?

#5 2009-10-23 18:52:49

Re: How can I easily move some space from NTFS to ext3 partition?

#6 2009-10-23 18:55:41

Re: How can I easily move some space from NTFS to ext3 partition?

#7 2009-10-23 20:06:08

Re: How can I easily move some space from NTFS to ext3 partition?

#8 2009-10-23 21:29:14

Re: How can I easily move some space from NTFS to ext3 partition?

#9 2009-10-23 21:53:36

Re: How can I easily move some space from NTFS to ext3 partition?

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