Non-destructive resizing of NTFS partitions?

Fred Savage Power Glove · November 2010

Just like it says on the tin.

I've got a 2TB NTFS partition that I would like to be HFS+ as I'm a Mac user. Right now I'm offloading as much data as possible to other external drives but it appears I'm going to come short without buying another drive. As it stands right now I've got about 850GB used on that partition and with a couple days work I could get it down to around 400GB.

I'd like to resize the 2TB NTFS partition to, say, 1TB and then create an HFS+ partition in the newly empty space. Bring the remaining data over to the HFS+ partition and then bring the entire drive up to a 2TB HFS+ partition.

Is this the dream of a mad man or something I can pull off? I do have VMWare, so I can run WinXP or Win7 if there are Windows tools that make this possible.

Sarksus · November 2010

I usually use GParted, either the utility itself burned to a bootable disc or a live CD of Ubuntu which has the utility included. It can resize, move and create new partitions without destroying data. Of course there's always a risk of something going wrong but I've used the utility to resize NTFS partitions at least on a dozen separate occasions.

Fred Savage Power Glove · November 2010

Completely forgot about just popping in an Ubuntu live CD/USB and seeing what happened.

However it turns out ASEUS Partition Manager is an easier answer.

I've got a friend that is a sysadmin for a bunch of Windows machines and he swears by it. I loaded it on my WinXP virtual machine and it resized the partition down to 11GB, moved it into the "middle" of the "drive" without breaking a sweat.

freakish light · November 2010

As a caution to anyone who wants to do this, remember that data on a hard drive isn't always used the most efficiently by the operating system. Before attempting this, you want to defrag and optimize your drive deeply, like running the full operation two or three times, to make absolutely sure that all of the data is at the beginning of the drive where it belongs. You don't want to resize the partition and find out some critical piece of a software installation had a memory address beyond where the new partition ends.

Fred Savage Power Glove · November 2010

freakish light wrote: »

As a caution to anyone who wants to do this, remember that data on a hard drive isn't always used the most efficiently by the operating system. Before attempting this, you want to defrag and optimize your drive deeply, like running the full operation two or three times, to make absolutely sure that all of the data is at the beginning of the drive where it belongs. You don't want to resize the partition and find out some critical piece of a software installation had a memory address beyond where the new partition ends.

From all the reading I did before I hit go, this isn't really the case anymore. Way back when, it could have been a problem. However modern partition tools know this and make accommodations accordingly. That's why you'll see "leave some free space in the new partition" all over most instruction lists, they want as much free space as possible to work with to help bring everything together.

---

I punched go on EASEUS and it's either sort of locked up or taking forever. From their (and others') support forum it appears that large partitions are going to take forever and a day. I'm hoping that it will have progressed at some point by the time I get up in about eight hours or I'm going to be a sad panda.

Sarksus · November 2010

Very large partitions can take awhile. It's the move commands that will take a really long time.

Fred Savage Power Glove · November 2010

Sarksus wrote: »

Very large partitions can take awhile. It's the move commands that will take a really long time.

I expected a long while but I was hoping for a more granular "there's shit going on!" status update is all.

It's moved 12 points since my last post, so this part of the resize should take just over five days.

Poop.

Loki_HKD · November 2010

Fred Savage's Power Glove wrote: »

freakish light wrote: »

As a caution to anyone who wants to do this, remember that data on a hard drive isn't always used the most efficiently by the operating system. Before attempting this, you want to defrag and optimize your drive deeply, like running the full operation two or three times, to make absolutely sure that all of the data is at the beginning of the drive where it belongs. You don't want to resize the partition and find out some critical piece of a software installation had a memory address beyond where the new partition ends.

From all the reading I did before I hit go, this isn't really the case anymore. Way back when, it could have been a problem. However modern partition tools know this and make accommodations accordingly. That's why you'll see "leave some free space in the new partition" all over most instruction lists, they want as much free space as possible to work with to help bring everything together.

---

I punched go on EASEUS and it's either sort of locked up or taking forever. From their (and others') support forum it appears that large partitions are going to take forever and a day. I'm hoping that it will have progressed at some point by the time I get up in about eight hours or I'm going to be a sad panda.

Even though things have changed. It is still good practice to do a defrag before you mess with resizing any partitions, just to be safe.

Fred Savage Power Glove · November 2010

Agree to disagree. I did not find a single partition manager that didn't automatically defragment via its own built in tool or with the Windows-proovided defrag tool when it was necessary.

freakish light · November 2010

Well, to be fair, I haven't even though about attempting this for at least... five years? So yeah, maybe things are different.

Still, there's no harm erring on the side of caution.

Fred Savage Power Glove · November 2010

Partition resize success! Now I'm moving it to the end of the drive.

"384000 of 204985383 completed"

Yes, that's 2 trillion

kitch · November 2010

I once resized the partitions on a 500gb drive with gparted. It took about 8 hours when about 75% of the drive was empty space to begin with. So if you are doing this with a fairly full drive, it may take much, much longer.

Fred Savage Power Glove · November 2010

kitch wrote: »

I once resized the partitions on a 500gb drive with gparted. It took about 8 hours when about 75% of the drive was empty space to begin with. So if you are doing this with a fairly full drive, it may take much, much longer.

Yeah, the resize process has completed and now it's just moving that partition to the end of the disk. It looks like this process will take much longer than the resize did.

Sarksus · November 2010

Oh hell yes it will.

Fred Savage Power Glove · November 2010

OH BOY

I accidentally quit VMWare this morning when I woke up for work, just checking on the status. I brought it back up and of course the move had failed. Windows complained it wasn't formatted but inspecting it with the partition manager didn't turn up anything weird.

I'm sure I've blown all of my data, but stay tuned! I know you're all on the edge of your collective seats.

kitch · November 2010

Fred Savage's Power Glove wrote: »

OH BOY

I accidentally quit VMWare this morning when I woke up for work, just checking on the status. I brought it back up and of course the move had failed. Windows complained it wasn't formatted but inspecting it with the partition manager didn't turn up anything weird.

I'm sure I've blown all of my data, but stay tuned! I know you're all on the edge of your collective seats.

So can I have some of my money back since I'm only using the edge?

Fred Savage Power Glove · November 2010

Completely forgot this thread existed but then kitch posted in it.

Partition fucked, data lost. Oh well!

Penny Arcade

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