[Nottingham] Reformatting a second harddrive

[Richard Ward]

Ron Wilton wrote:
> Hello
> 
> Thanks everyone for the replies, though I do like the idea of using gParted.
> 
> Richard, could you tell me if the graphics representing the partitions 
> show how the data is stored (i.e. to one end of the partition), or 
> whether the data could be anywhere in the partition, please?

No, its just a graph, could be anywhere.

> I'm wanting to shrink some partitions and therefore wanting to know if such an 
> action will delete some data.

No it won't. When you shrink a partition it first of all moves all of 
the data at the end of the partition out of the way, then it resizes the 
partition, then creates any new ones.

The resizing ought to be safe... if it turns out it can't make enough 
contiguous space at the end, it should abort cleanly without damaging 
the file system. I've used it a number of times on ext2,ext3,fat and 
ntfs. That said, you should make sure your data is backed up unless you 
are prepared for it to be lost!

If in GParted you click "View" -> "File System Support", it will give 
you a list of what it can do with the various file systems (grow, srink, 
move, etc), and it even tells you what package to search for in synaptic 
if it can't do your desired file system.

Good luck!

> Thanks
> 
> Ron


> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> --- On *Tue, 24/11/09, Richard Ward /<daedalusfall at gmail.com>/* wrote:
> 
> 
>     From: Richard Ward <daedalusfall at gmail.com>
>     Subject: Re: [Nottingham] Reformatting a second harddrive
>     To: "Notts GNU/Linux Users Group" <nottingham at mailman.lug.org.uk>
>     Date: Tuesday, 24 November, 2009, 7:33
> 
>     James Gibbon wrote:
>      > Hi Ron,
>      >
>      > On Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:09:05 +0000 (GMT)
>      > Ron Wilton <ron_w_add at yahoo.co.uk
>     </mc/compose?to=ron_w_add at yahoo.co.uk>> wrote:
>      >> I currently have two
>      >> internal harddrives on computer.
>      >>
>      >> I want to reformat the second one [...]
>      > [...] put a new filesystem on it by
>      > using mkfs.ext3 (or equivalent) from a terminal.
>      >
> 
>     If you want a nice gui for partitioning things, try gparted (GNOME
>     Partition Editor). It will also let you see what your current
>     partitions
>     on any given drive are.
> 
>     While I am usually happy to do things from the terminal I prefer using
>     gparted for formatting stuff - its easier to identify which drive is
>     which, its much harder to make mistakes, and presents all the options
>     for moving/resizing etc.
> 
> 
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> 
> 
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