[ltp] Q: safe partition resize tool?

[Szakacsits Szabolcs]

On Thu, 21 Oct 2004 perley@adelphia.net wrote:

> 1) I thought QTParted is just a GUI version of Parted, so why the
> difference unless the ones you used are different releases?

QTParted can use external utilities additionally while Parted can't. 
E.g. QTParted can create and resize NTFS but Parted can't.
 
> 2) With either PM or QTParted/ntfsresize, you have to have a new
> enough version to deal with the XP partition because NTFS under XP is
> a bit different that that in win2K or winNT.  

This is true for PM.

A new enough version of QTParted/ntfsresize is needed to be able to resize
NTFS without shrinkage limitation. This way there is no need to defragment
uselessly: quite often it didn't help, hence safe data relocation support
was added to ntfsresize a year ago.

> The one that came with the Knoppix I downloaded in March was not new
> enough, but I got the newer ntfsresize at sourceforge.net

Today Knoppix has the latest QTParted but it still has a very old
ntfsresize, it can't relocate data at all, only resize with severe
restictions (it's still safe but not so useful).

If my time permits I'm trying to follow up distro specific statuses here:

	http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html#example

> > > Recently I resized my /home partition to make room for another one
> (playing around with LFS). IIRC, QTParted cannot resize an ext3
> partition. It can resize other filesystems but not ext3. Instead I
> used parted which can resize ext3.

Parted can't resize ext3 (but you can convert it to ext2 then resize it
then convert it back but not all of these by Parted). AFAIK, QTparted
can't either but it would be easy to add this support by using its
external utility wrapper.

	Szaka