Re: repartitioning without destroying current partition
On Wed, 1 Oct 1997 02:46:09 +0200, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
>Under DOS, you have to defragment your partition (so that at the end of it
>is free disc space), then you can lower the end of it with FIPS.EXE (free
>software).
>
>It works good, but you cannot make your partition bigger this way (IRC). You
>can however keep a copy of your partition table (and restore it). Then you
>have the old way again. All a bit risky, though.
FAT partition geometry is kept in the superblock. As long as eveything is
within the same scheme (IE FAT16) its perfectly safe to make it bigger or
smaller (assuming to have the contiguous free space at the end to
shrink/expand it. As you said defrag it first if you and going down in
size.)
Real filesystems such as ext2 use some sort of algorithm it place data on
the disk to reduce fragmentaion. Now this algorithm could coinside with
the size or geometry of the partition. Changing the partition size changes
the scheme of how it puts and retreives data, and after a size change its location
'tables' may no longer jive with the actual location of the data. Whether
ext2 does this (or any FS, I dunno it's just a possibilty that comes to
mind) you would need to find out from an FS guru.
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