Jitu

Recently a few friends bought several laptops. Beside the limited standard shareware, also my favorite operating system was installed: Windows Visa. After the excitement about the purchases has passed by, complains started about the size of the partitions and the slow systems. Fortunately Windows Visa includes a partition manager which is even able to resize the partitions. However when it comes to resize the partition on which the operating system resides (namely “C:\”), the partition manager capitulates. It seems that it expects a minimum size of around 60 or 80GB (cannot remember). Out of this space already 21GB is occupied by Windows itself and the preinstalled and mostly useless shareware.

Fortunately the Ubuntu LiveCD booted flawlessly on those systems and allowed to change the partitions in any way the users wanted to do. Even the C-drive preformated with NTFS, could be resized by GParted, which is included on that CD. Well, obviously the partition must be a little bit bigger to hold all data on the drive (marked with the yellow shadow) and lesser than the overall disk space.

After resizing, Windows Visa complains about some errors on the partitions and wants to perform integrity checks. After the checks completed, everything works fine and normal without any loss of data. However before you start, please consider the following:

• You have to shut down Windows cleanly and completely. Otherwise GParted will not alter anything on that partition. So do not hibernate or suspend your system, before changing the sizes.
• Resizing will take lots of time. Make sure that you attach your power supply, if you alternate the partition sizes of a laptop. Data loss is imminent otherwise.
• If you use an extended partitions to hold logical drive, it must be the only one or the last one on the drive. Do not let a primary partition follow any extended partitions including logical drives. This is not accepted by Windows and it will crash with a blue screen while booting. At least that is my experience.
• Please backup your data. Nothing is more frustrating than to recover documents and holiday photos from a failed operation. Although it looks easy and partition alternating is just a few clicks away, it is a major change and reallocation of data, which might result in data loss./li>

To execute GParted on Ubuntu, download an iso image file and burn it on a CD. For a one time use, any CD type will work: CDR oder CDRW. After the image has been written, boot from the CD which takes almost the same time than booting Windows Vista from hard disk (Sorry, could not resist ). Select the first option in the menu (“Try out Ubuntu” or similar). Wait till the graphical interface comes up, go to “Applications” (top left) -> “Accessories” -> “Terminal” and type “sudo gparted” at the prompt.

GParted will come up, analyzing your current configuration of the hard disk. By right-clicking on the partitions, you will see all available options. The next questions that might come up is: What partition number is what drive letter in Windows? Usually the first readable partition by Windows on the first drive is C:\, the second one is D:\ etc… Readable are partitions when they are either formated in NTFS or any FAT file system. E.g. in the picture sda1 is mapped to C:\, sda2 and sda3 are not readable by Windows (ext3 and linux-swap) and hence do not have a drive letter. sda5 till sda7 have D:\, E:\, and F:\ respectively (FAT32). It is also possible to work with labels. If you label a disk in Windows, the name is also displayed in GParted.

The big advantage of using GParted: It is totally free of cost and available in the net compared to commercial product such as PartitionMagic. In addtion it provides almost the same look-and-feel and mostly needed functionality.