Ubuntu
gparted package

Do I need to do anything before resizing ext3 smaller and adding ntfs partition?

Asked by Aaron Whitehouse

Hello,

I have been using Ubuntu since Hoary, so know it pretty well. I have an external 500GB HDD that is formatted ext3 and has about 300GB of data on it. I now need to make it so that the disk has a 400GB ext3 partition (instead of a 500GB one) and a 100GB ntfs partition. I know that I have to install ntfsprogs to do the ntfs and am pretty comfortable with GParted.

I'm pretty sure that I can just go into GParted and use the GUI to resize the ext3 partition and add a new partition that is ntfs.

My question is, do I need to do anything to make sure that none of the 350GB of data on the disk is in the part of the partition that is going to be cut off? I recall some time that I did a similar thing on Windows, I had to defrag the hard disk to make sure all of the data was at the front of the hard drive before I resized it (and essentially chopped off the end).

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Ubuntu gparted Edit question
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Mario Cianciolo
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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#1

backup! backup! backup! backup! backup! backup! backup! backup! backup! backup! backup! backup!

Before you do any resizing, backup.

The file system does support resizing nicely but if you backup then if it goes wrong then you can restore the data, if the data is fine you can (if there is a backup regime elsewhere) then destroy the backup.

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Best Mario Cianciolo (udda) said : 		#2

gparted itself checks if partition data exceeds the desired new size and eventually relocates it, no additional operations required. However, making a backup of your data is never a bad idea.

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Aaron Whitehouse (aaron-whitehouse) said : 		#3

Thanks Salvatore Udda, that solved my question.