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Trying to resize 2 ntfs system and boot partitions (windows 2003 server) using GParted. Goal:

  • Resize D: (/dev/sda1) to ~850G - this is the boot drive with D:\ntldr, boot.ini, etc.
  • Resize C: (/dev/sda5) to 100G - this is the system drive with C:\windows

Tried resizing /dev/sda5 first and got the chkdsk error shown in screenshot #2. (You must run chkdsk /f). Have already run chkdsk /f on C: multiple times with no bad sectors or errors found. Have also run multiple chkdsk /f's on the underlying hard disk multiple times and rebooted way more than a couple times with the same error.

  1. How do you force gparted to ignore this error and resize? I found there is --force option to ntfsresize but don't know how to get the GParted ISO live CD to use it.

  2. How do you move the unallocated space so an extra ~750G is to the right of /dev/sda1 (D:), and an extra 10G to the right of /dev/sda5 (C:)

gparted

gparted chkdsk

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  • @Phanto all that information is in the first screenshot
    – Michael Lowman
    Jan 7, 2011 at 15:12
  • Sorry, I don't see a link to the screenshot.
    – Phanto
    Jan 7, 2011 at 15:13
  • @Phanto I figured as much :) it's in the post, not linked. i.imgur.com/qlEeD.png and i.imgur.com/8baV2.png
    – Michael Lowman
    Jan 7, 2011 at 15:16
  • Ahh, my company's firewall blocked it.
    – Phanto
    Jan 7, 2011 at 15:17
  • @Phanto here you go: sda1 primary partition drive d: 92 GiB, sda2 extended partition 760 GiB containing (sda5 drive c: 19 GiB, unallocated 740 GiB), remainder (98 GiB) unallocated. Now you can join in :) oh, and the second shows a failure in cluster accounting is causing the check failure.
    – Michael Lowman
    Jan 7, 2011 at 15:25

3 Answers 3

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In answer to your second question: while you can resize partitions, you cannot move them. The start of a filesystem cannot be changed. So if you want to add 10 GiB after drive C: D:, you'll need to delete drive D: C: and recreate it in the proper location. Second, you should delete your extended partition sda2 and recreate it to fill the remainder of the space. Otherwise, you'll be restricted by the boundary at the end of sda2; you can't make a partition cross that border.

Also... if the check keeps failing, it may point to a bad disk.

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  • There is the option in GParted to Move a partition, so apparently it's possible, though I don't know if Windows will boot anymore if the partition is not in the same place.
    – ane
    Jan 7, 2011 at 15:55
  • I can't delete drive D: because that is the boot partition - it contains D:\ntldr and D:\boot.ini
    – ane
    Jan 7, 2011 at 15:55
  • I could be wrong, since I don't usually use parted, but I think that option is more for moving partitions between disks rather than moving from one location to another overlapping location. You could do this by making a bit-copy backup of the partition with dd and then restoring it, but you'd have to have somewhere to store the data. I believe parted's "move" is more of a "copy-then-delete" thing
    – Michael Lowman
    Jan 7, 2011 at 16:10
  • Michael, have you or anyone used any other applications such as Acronis or Ghost to do similar resizing on win2003 system/boot partitions? I looked at Acronis and the screenshots of their Linux resize screen look similar to GParted resize dialog, so I'm not sure if it work.
    – ane
    Jan 7, 2011 at 19:58
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    ah, I thought you were attempting to use the same disk. bit for bit would work, but should be functionally equivalent to your Backup Exec copy. if you're saying that the bootloader partition is working and loading, but just points to the old now-non-existent windows install, have you tried editing the boot.ini manually? alternatively, are you certain that the new disk is detected without loading additional drivers? last, why do you want such a massive bootloader partition? could there be a way around this issue?
    – Michael Lowman
    Jan 14, 2011 at 17:09
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This may be more difficult than you would like.

Looking at the screenshot, here is what I would do:

  1. Try to resize the C drive partition in Windows (assuming you have a version that has the Disk Management utility to do so, i.e. not XP home). This may potentially eliminate any bizarre issue with GParted.
  2. Resize the extended partition to the desired size
  3. Image the extended partition
  4. Delete the extended partition
  5. Resize Drive D to the desired 850GB
  6. Restore the imaged partition

That should hopefully work, assuming that the configuration files in Drive D knows where to find drive C.

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  • 2
    Phanto's quite right. tbh, backup reinstall restore may be easier. I stand by my worries about the disk, though: if that error didn't go away with a forced check on Windows, you have problems.
    – Michael Lowman
    Jan 7, 2011 at 15:35
  • It's Windows Server 2003, and Microsoft's diskpart utility refuses to operate on boot or system partitions.
    – ane
    Jan 7, 2011 at 15:50
  • Have you tried resizing the partitions using diskpart in a recovery console? Command line interfaces are not very nice, but it might just work.
    – Phanto
    Jan 7, 2011 at 16:57
  • As it turns out, Server 2003 is different with partitioning than standard non-server. support.microsoft.com/kb/325590 states "System or boot volumes may be blocked from being extended". Apparently, people have used 3rd party utilities to perform the re-size. Perhaps GParted just can't do it.
    – Phanto
    Jan 7, 2011 at 17:08
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The PartedMagic ISO has testdisk and mhdd. testdisk may recognize and fix the problem. mhdd may as well.

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