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Re: moving partition boundries???



I used to have Partition Magic 3.0x installed back in the days when I
was using a 2GB disk and it was definately one of my favorite programs.
There was a posting on Slashdot awhile back that Partition Magic 4.0,
when released, will fully support Linux partitions with ext2 formating,
and IIRC this part would be available for free download. Definately a
good thing....

I remember 3.0x would at least recognise ext2 partitions but you
couldn't move, resize, play with cluster sizes (don't know why you'd
want to do this with ext2 anyways though), etc... none of the cool
things PM lets you do with fat/vfat/fat32/hpfs/ntfs partitions. Another
cool thing about PM is that you don't need to manually defrag a
partition before resizing it. Quite an impressive piece of software
Powerquest managed to pull off....

Of course, now that I have my 9.1GB disk I don't really need it anymore
since at any given time it seems I have at least 2GB of unpartitioned
space and I keep my disk _very_ split so if I want to move ext2
partitions around I can use the 2GB+ for temporary space to store the
files from an Ext partition while preparing where the files are to go.

The ability to change the boundaries of the extended partition sure is
something I miss though when I had PM 3.0x. This operation never took
more than a fraction of a second (unlike, say, resizing a partition and
changing the cluster size at the same time, which would take _FOREVER_,
understandably). Since the extended partition resize only takes a
fraction of a second and the extended partition itself has no formatting
of any kind to complicate matters then I suppose that fundamentally all
that defines an extended partition may just be a few bytes of data in
the MBR to set boundaries, so if that is true then AFAIK it couldn't be
modifying more than 512 bytes of data, which leads one to wonder if a
free extended partition resizer could be developed without taking too
much time/effort. Of course, I think partitioning software is the last
thing on the list of stuff most people would be willing to beta test....


Hank Fay wrote:
> 
> I checked with PM tech, and they confirmed this. They can recognize and I
> think create; but that's it.
> 
> Hank
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ed Cogburn [mailto:ecogburn@greene.xtn.net]
> Sent: Wednesday, August 12, 1998 11:37 AM
> To: Debian Users
> Subject: Re: moving partition boundries???
> 
> Richard E. Hawkins Esq. wrote:
> >
> > I thought I saw an option for this in fdisk along the way, but now i can't
> > find it.  Now that I've moved about 40 floppies over by hand (no network
> > card), I've found that if I set up a hibernation file in dos, the hardware
> > will automatically use it.  So I'd like to peel back the end of my
> > / partition by 20mb . . . Is there any way to do this, or am I stuck
> > with a complete reinstall if i want this?
> >
> > rick
> >
> 
>         I'm afraid you are stuck.  I think somebody said the commercial app
> Partition Magic can do this, but I'll bet it can only split DOS/Win FAT
> type partitions.  There is no prog in the Linux world, that I've heard
> of, that can split an ext2 partition.
> 
> --
> Ed C.
> 
> --
> Unsubscribe?  mail -s unsubscribe debian-user-request@lists.debian.org < /dev/null


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