Scared to use qtparted or gparted

[meburke]

I have a three year old Toshiba laptop that boots both MS WindowsXP Home and Kubuntu, but I want to downgrade it to a Windows-only system. I would like to backup the disk image to an external USB hard drive (no problem using dd), but I'm very afraid of extending the current Windows partition using qtparted or gparted and not being able to restore my Windows partition if it fails. (If I remember, dd would require me to restore the Windows partition EXACTLY to size.)

Can someone point me to a specific set of instructions? Has anyone used qtparted or gparted to extend their working Windows partition successfully? (If I lose the ability to use the windows configuration I have, I will lose a client. The software for the client's stuff is on this partition and I will not be able to re-install it. I want to extend the ntfs partition because I need more space for the data files.)

I really like having both LINUX and Windows on this system, and I have cygwin installed on the WXP, but cygwin is not totally satisfactory. (Neither is the Apache2triad installation I have on that partition, but I need a local Apache server for testing my Web development.) I think I'd be better off removing cygwin and using an embedded version of DSL or using Puppy when I need Linux capabilities.

Any feedback will be appreciated.

Thanks,

Mike B.

[drb]

I have used qparted (latest version on Kanotix LiveCD) on a newish computer to reduce the size of the single partition (after defragmenting, stopping page file etc so that all the data was 'within' the new partition size). I then added partitions to put linux (kanotix), swap + home. I wasn't worried if it went wrong as there wasn't much on it. I can't recall if it was FAT32 or NTFS.

If all you are doing is increasing the size of the Windows partition, the risk should be lower but there is always a risk. Why not just remove linux, amalgamate partition(s) and have a second partition alongside Windows for files etc.

[OErjan]

actually "dd" will restore it as it looked when you made the copy

dd if=/dev/hda of=/media/whatever/path/toshibabackup.img
so everything will be as it is now, just be aware that the media you copy to must suport large files and that writing to NTFS is risky.
personally I would use ext3 for the partition where I would store that disk image.
If am not all out of it due to this flu, you would loose nothing but time if things went wrong with the partition.

some info you may not need/wnat folows
you could pipe output trough gzip and compress it,

dd if=/dev/hda |gzip -9 >/media/whatever/path/toshibabackup.img.gz
to restore do something like this

gzip -cd /media/whatever/path/toshibabackup.img.gz > /dev/hda
if you have fat. perhaps split could be used, not sure how to use split in operation above but some person likely knows

[meburke]

I appreciate the feedback, guys. If you have successfully reduced a partition without losing data, then I believe I can extend a partition without losing data. Ill finish the current project with what I've got now and prepare the drive for the next project next week.

The reason I need the larger partition is that the customer's app was written in a way that prevents it from operating over multiple partitions or drives. This is one of the things I need to cure. (This is an app handed down in FORTRAN90, but it's gotten out of hand over the years. In fact, looking at the architecture, I suspect that the app may simply be FORTRAN77 converted to FORTRAN90. I'm moving it to FORTRAN95 or, if I can find a free compiler, FORTRAN2003 and redesigning it to more OO-compliancy.)

Any opinions about replacing cygwin? The maintenance on cygwin is as bad as maintaining a separate LINUX distro.

[OErjan]

i have done it ONCE (1 time) so nothing i would stake y life on...