Shrinking a FAT32 partition on USB drive

[Basil Chupin]

On 24/03/13 14:58, Jerry Lapham wrote:
> On Saturday, March 23, 2013 01:24:01 AM Basil Chupin wrote:
>
>> 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....
> Thanks.  It took several tries but I finally got Win7 to defrag it.  It had
> kept saying it was 0% fragmented.

Good!

BTW, I have yet to see any native Windows defragmenter work quickly and 
efficiently. There was one most excellent defragmenter, whose name I 
have now forgotten, but MS bought it out and turned it into an arse of 
an application and started to use it as its default defragmenter. I am 
assuming that it is still in use in W#7 and W#8.

If you want to have a REAL and PROPER defragmenter then get O&O Defrag - 
a German (what else!) program which you will find here:

http://www.oo-software.com/en

You'll be paying for it (30Euros for 1 PC)  but it is *worth* *every* 
*penny*.

>    Windows Partition Manager wouldn't shrink
> it

Why aren't I surprised? :-)

>   but KDE Partition Manager did.  BTW, it says it's using libparted.

BTW, I used GParted last night and found that it did do a chkdsk on a 
Windows partition - but I don't know if it would actually do a chkdsk 
"fix" run because the partition did not have any errors to begin with.


> After all that I found I didn't need to shrink the partition after all. I
> could have let Clonezilla just create its directory on the big partition.

I have always taken the view that using something which is designed 
specifically to do a job and which is well known to do the job is better 
than something which is "cure all" - but I state this with some 
"conditions apply" :-) . I guess it all depends on what most people 
advise you from experience and what you observe from your own experiences.

Overall, I am glad that you got your hassle sorted out.

BC

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