Shrinking a FAT32 partition on USB drive

[Basil Chupin]

On 23/03/13 16:36, Cody Smith wrote:
> On 03/22/2013 10:24 PM, Basil Chupin wrote:
>> 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
>>
> The reason people say to manage Windows filesystems in Windows is
> because Linux can't actually fix most filesystem errors in NTFS and FAT,
> even though the repair tools "supposedly" exist, that has to be done
> with Windows chkdsk. Linux can resize and delete partitions, just not
> fix them. that's a current weak area in Linux.

OK, thanks for confirming my thoughts.

But you, honestly, cannot state "that's a current weak area in Linux" 
because Windows is not opensource. It's not the fault of any Linux distro.

BC

-- 
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