How to make linux partition larger in dual boot

[kixphantom]

Ok. The answer to my question may be in the forum some place but I cannot find it exactly. I have a dual boot system with windows taking up the larger part of my HD. When I installed pclos some months ago I just went with the defaults and the installation only gave linux about 7% not including the swap. My question is how do I safley make my linux partition larger. I currently have:

sda1 (windows): 61G
empty: 2.1G
swap: 3.8G
/: 3.4G
/home: 2.7G

I need more room for openoffice and other programs.

I have Windows xp
80G hd
1.2G ram(will be 2G soon)

Thanks. 

[nixer]

My suggestion would be to use a livecd of gparted and resize the partitions as you wish.  But first, I would defragment the xp partition a couple of times.

As a safety measure, back up all important data in case something goes wrong, and it sometimes does when partitions are resized.  But when using gparted I have had fewer problems.

I hope this helps.

[melodie]

Hi,

I agree with nixer. Here are a couple more tools to help : first, a very efficient defragmenter for Windows, and second, a video I did to show how to shrink/resize a ntfs partition with the Live Gparted.

http://ultradefrag.sourceforge.net

Download file:
partitionnement.ogg

read it with any video reader.

[T6]

both recommendations are ok but i am always more careful when doing that

while resizing xp can be done, defrag a ntfs partition sometimes brings undesired consequences

in another post asking this question it was recommended to simply wipe linux, resize ntfs partition and then reinstalling linux in a new properly dimensioned partition

all this was done after doing a proper backup of both os, linux and windows to avoid accidental data loss

when you edit partitions on hard disk it is always possible to have undesired results wiping important files permanently by accident or with a error in the operation so avoid if possible this situation

if the space you report free on xp is right, there is not much to gain by doing this procedure, you have a old ide ata hard disk of only 80 gbs

in your case i would take the route i mentioned earlier, wipe linux and create only a 512 mbs swap because 3.8 gbs of swap is a complete waste of space, the recommended space for swap is 1.5 times the size of the ram on your system and in your case it is 1.2 and this should be around 1800 mbs of swap

i have the same amount of ram that you have there and swap is used only when i open really big images, lots of pages, lots of apps and only can reach 200 mbs of swap, under normal usage with some office docs, opera, a audio player and videos and small stuff running i use 600 mbs of ram, maximum and no swap at all

i would create a swap and a / partition and nothing more, no /home partition, /home can be a folder in / and work perfectly like that, i have done it like that since...  forever!

using pclinux since 2007 like this without a single problem

the xp partition only has 2.1 gbs free, if you don't leave that space there that os will suffer, windows always misbehaves when you don't have at least 1 gb free on hard disk so i would remove unused files and apps there too but wouldn't resize now, if it is that full defragment will take alot of time, 5 hours or more and you will have to do the process many times and no guarantee of this procedure giving you the desired result

[melodie]

5 hours or more and you will have to do the process many times and no guarantee of this procedure giving you the desired result

This is not a general case : if the machine is fairly recent (4 to 6 years old max ?), with a good CPU, if the defragmentation has been done once a while, and if he uses Ultradefrag (an Open Source software which is powerful, not the defrag tool provided natively with Windows) then it can be fairly fast, and additionnally he will gain in speed when he will use Windows. That tool can also be configured to be started at the boot of Windows, and or to be used instead of the screensaver : it will defragment each time that the computer is left alone for a period of time that is to be defined during the configuration.

I agree about the swap : much too big, it's not useful. If the machine never uses hibernation or suspend to ram, the swap can even be as small as 400 or 500 MB (I have a 1244 MB swap, just because I do remaster once a while and don't want to be too short, and also use suspend to ram, on a machine with 1 GB).

when you edit partitions on hard disk it is always possible to have undesired results wiping important files permanently by accident or with a error in the operation so avoid if possible this situation

Which is the reason why backups of personal data are always recommended. I should say I have used Gparted live for a few years now, and Gparted installed on hard drive too (I have it on a primary and resize partitions that are on another primary, or in extended), and never had one problem ever, though I do that several times a year, on several different machines.

There is one thing which is nice about backups, you can backup just the datas, or backup entire systems. I have come to know Clonezilla recently, and was surprised to see that it was not as difficult to use as I would have feared... and did a backup of a brand new nonfree OS... and several Linux partitions. Very good job, very impressive ! and I had to restore from that file later (had screwed up the Windows boot while experimenting strange sorceries on it. ) and the restore worked as well.

So, backup datas, then backup partitions with Clonezilla, that's a good deal. Once done, do as you want with Linux : enlarge it or redo it, as you will.

Windows : needs space to work, I'm sure it does need a bit of space, else it might not know where to swap !

I usually go to the web, and get the doc to re-read how to fix the size of it's file swap (to 50 MB if I remember well), instead of leaving it with the default (unlimited).

[T6]

"This is not a general case : if the machine is fairly recent (4 to 6 years old max ?), with a good CPU, if the defragmentation has been done once a while"

that is the best case, i always end up in the worst situation with a very old machine with a ata 100 or ata 66 cable or ide port, a slow port and slow rpm hard disk(slow as a continent moving) fragmented to the infinite

this is more than 40% of the machines i find

"Windows : needs space to work, I'm sure it does need a bit of space, else it might not know where to swap !"

the sad part is that pagefile.sys in xp does exactly the same as swap but it also needs the extra space 

[melodie]

the sad part is that pagefile.sys in xp does exactly the same as swap but it also needs the extra space 

A driver my companion used to setup to use Linux Swap Partition as windows Swap file
http://www.acc.umu.se/~bosse/

SwapFs
Release 3.0 (2010-07-21)
SwapFs-3.0 is a driver for Windows that let you use a Linux swap partition for temporary storage like a RAM-disk. It is possible to put Windows page file on it and it has support for Plug and Play and Power Management so that standby and hibernation works. SwapFs is implemented as a disk filter driver.
Latest news: Support for FAT32 and swap partitions bigger than 4GB.

Enjoy!

[kixphantom]

Ok. I repartitioned windows down to 42GB which it reports as that. but linux still reports the original configuration for some reason. I'm guessing from all the reply's that the best thing to do would be to reinstall linux and choose my partitions instead of accepting defaults.

[T6]

as you see resize partitions is not always a good idea, at least with ntfs on xp

when you do it(install pclinux), try to create / in ext4 and swap at a smaller size, if system can see the free space you can create a /home partition if you like(ext4 too) but i personally never bother doing that

[kixphantom]

Maybe the best idea would be to wipe and start from scratch, and choose my partitions. Just seems like allot of work.

[melodie]

Maybe the best idea would be to wipe and start from scratch, and choose my partitions. Just seems like allot of work.

Hi,

When you say "linux still sees the original configuration", I am weary about what you see, and I'll tell you why : if you look in some guys, you'll get wrong results.

If you look with a console, you should get good results.

Mount the ntfs partition on a directory, then do in console the command "df -h". You should then see the size that you put.

What about Gparted ? If you install it in your PCLinuxOS install, and start it, you should also see the size it is now (even without mounting it), the size it really uses and the free size left. (Same for the other partitions).

Do the repartitioning of your partition with Live Gparted, and you should be able to enlarge PCLinuxOS (from the left to the right first, one operation at a time in order not to load too much information to the memory). Have you watched the video I gave the link ?

[Ferdes Fides]

Maybe the best idea would be to wipe and start from scratch, and choose my partitions. Just seems like allot of work.

Let me butt in here for a minute.   

Do you have a backup of your Windows partition and your Linux partitions ?
Clonezilla works great but if you downsize it doesn't work, upsizing the
restore partition does work. 

What is the status of your OS backups on that disk ?    Be sure you have
something to fall back on.


Patrick013

[shrinivas]

With due respect, perhaps you should buy another HDD and install PCLinuxOs on it, keep both the OS's seperate so no problem occurs.
Regards

[T6]

not useful if you have a netbook or a old machine, buy more hardware is not the solution sometimes

[plankton172]

....it was recommended to simply wipe linux, resize ntfs partition and then reinstalling linux in a new properly dimensioned partition

all this was done after doing a proper backup of both os, linux and windows to avoid accidental data loss

Hello,

Been reading this thread for some time and concluded I maybe in the same situation as the TS. My computer has one 500GB hard drive divided into 2 equal size partitions. It was first installed with Win7 on the first partition (c:) and the other partition (d:) reserved for "data."

I installed 2010.12 PCLinuxOS afterwards and so it became dual boot. During the install process, I wasn't paying too much attention to sizes and allocations and honestly did notice (or cared to explore) the "expert mode" of draklive-install at the time. It was just recently that I discovered <gasp!> I allocated a so very little room for this mighty OS -- less than 50GB (the "defaults" of draklive-install) for /, /home and /swap.

So now, I plan to use the entire "d:" partition for PCLinuxOS (more than 200GB of space). But before I proceed, I have some questions:

How do I "simply wipe linux"? Do I need a livecd of GParted (as mentioned in the posts)? Or can I just use the PCLinuxOS livecd (2010.12) that I used to install this OS?

Sorry for the uber-newbie questions...

Thank you.