[Malvern] Cfdisk - A stupid question!

[Andy Morris]

SuSe can shrink a pre-existing windoze partition to make room for installing
itself into a new linux partition in the freed-up space, but this only works
upto W2000. M$'s habit of demanding the first partition has an accidental
usefulness.  Unfortunately, XP has a habit (deliberate I suspect) of
locating non-movable system files in the top 25% of the M$ partition,
effectively inhibiting shrinkage.  You have to define the M$ partition on a
dual-(or multi-)boot system before loading XP.  Presumably SuSe used linux
fdisk or cfdisk; but, of course, the created linux partition is initially
blank.

I have never heard of varying the size of an occupied partition within a
Unix or Unix like system without destroying the filesystem. I always had to
backup the contents of a partition to a safe location, then resize it, then
reload, because the Unix resize always involves recreating a filesystem in
the resized partition.  As far as I know, Linux follows this principle.


Andy
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Robin Wilson" <r.t.wilson at rmplc.co.uk>
To: <malvern at mailman.lug.org.uk>
Sent: Wednesday, August 04, 2004 9:31 PM
Subject: [Malvern] Cfdisk - A stupid question!


> Hi all,
>
> This is probably a stupid question...but can cfdisk resize partitions?
>
> I want to use it to resize my linux partitions to create some new ones for
> another OS, but I can't.
>
> Is this just me, or does cfdisk really not have any ability to resize
> existing partitions?
>
> Robin