Shrinking a FAT32 partition on USB drive

[Basil Chupin]

On 23/03/13 15:47, Jerry Lapham wrote:
> I have a 160GB external USB drive for back up.  It has the single FAT32
> partition it came with.  I'd like to shrink it to a 100GB so I can Clonezilla
> a couple of 20GB  partitions from an old laptop onto it.
>
> Using KDE Partition Manager I get the following after about 15 seconds:
[pruned]

I won't quote your full post but I have these comments and question(s):

To begin with, if you want to shrink a partition formatted in a Windows 
file system you first need to DEFRAGMENT that partition - which, in your 
case, is the whole 160GB HDD. And the only way you are going to do this 
is to boot into Windows and do a defrag of the partition. Then you can 
go about shrinking it using, say, Gparted -- I didn't know that KDE 
Partition Manager could do this, but then it is based on Gparted. Anyway....

You then go on to say that you had did "starting KDE Partition Manager 
and running Check and repair, I still get...".

Once again, I wasn't aware that one could do this check and repair 
unless you were using a Windows OS where you would run "chkdsk X: /f" 
(where X was the drive letter to check and repair the Windows file 
system). So, is the KDE Partition Manager capable of doing this Windows 
procedure of checking and repairing a Windows file system (in your case 
FAT32)?

A reason why I am asking this is because I have long understood that the 
suggestion made by many others over the years of 'when dealing with 
Windows stuff use Windows stuff to do whatever you want done to a 
Windows file system; and use Linux for Linux file systems'.


(Just as a 'follow-up', so to speak :-) , I am in the process of doing 
something like what you are doing: I have a 2TB external HDD formatted 
in ntfs but need to have at least 1TB formatted in ext4. I have 
defragmented the HDD and am about to use GParted to shrink the available 
space to make 1TB, or more, available to be formatted in ext4. But I 
used Windows to first chkdsk the HDD and then used the Windows defrag to 
defrag the HDD. And now Gparted will hopefully do the rest :-) .)

BC

-- 
Using openSUSE 12.3 x86_64 with KDE 4.10.1 & kernel 3.8.3-1