Shrinking a partition

[John Summerfield]

Colin Paul Adams wrote:
>>>>>>"Dan" == Dan  <grinnz at gmail.com> writes:
> 
> 
>     Dan> What you need to do is DELETE the partition, and then
> 
> Ouch!
> I take it deleting it then recreating it in the same position (but for
> a smaller length) is supposed NOT to lose the data if you get it
> right?
> 

Correct.

Note
For some partitions structures, resizing cannot be done properly. I have 
a laptop that came with this layout:

hda1 Recovery
hda2 Windows (C:)
hda3 Extended
hda5 Windows (D:).

I now have Linux on hda4 and cannot resize hda2 _and_ use the space freed.


Note
I was recently playing with a server (Dell, WIndows 2003 SBS) and I 
wasn't keen on resizing the NTFS partition (we'd copied the entire drive 
and were working on the copy) because there was 32 Mb of free space in 
front of it. What worked in this case was creating a partition to soak 
up the space, but I was not sure it would.

Note to disk hackers
If the MBR is from DOS/Windows/Darwin, be sure that a parition is marked 
active. Otherwise the bootstrap code will not find which partition you 
want to boot and your disk will not boot.



>     Dan> recreate it at the correct size. (If you're using ext3;
>     Dan> parted can resize some other types of filesystems like ext2,
>     Dan> vfat itself.) But if you do it too small, you could lose
>     Dan> everything.
> 
>     Dan> backup everything on the partition first, if that's possible.
> 
> I wish it was.