GParted won't resize a FAT32 partition.

[Henk Koster]

On Thu, 08 Jun 2006 17:03:03 +0000, Neil Woolford wrote:

> I have an elderly Dell laptop with a 20MB hard drive.  The drive was originally
> one large Windows 98 FAT32 partition.
> 
> Over the last few years I have installed various Linuxes in a second, EXT3
> partition on the same drive.  I now have a bootable FAT32 of around 16MB 
> containing Windows 98 and a 4GB partition with Ubuntu Dapper Drake on the one
> drive (plus a small swap partition of course).  I wish to move over to using
> Dapper on a daily basis, so want to give it a little more room at the expense of
> Windows, which I am phasing out.  There is around 3GB unused within the Windows
> (FAT32) partition.
> 
> My attempts to use GParted to shrink this partition have failed.  If the FAT32
> partition is not mounted, GParted warns me that it cannot read it, but would
> allow me to resize it down by about 7MB, which is not worth doing.  If I mount
> the partition, the correct information about free space within it becomes
> available, but of course GParted won't resize a mounted partition.
> 
> This happens using GParted both from within the Dapper installation and from the
> Dapper Live CD.
> 
> Where am I going wrong?
> 
> Neil
> 
> PS  I can't get the GParted live CD to work at all on this particular laptop,
> due to a firmware bug with DMA.  The Dapper live CD has to be started with
> ide=nodma as a parameter to work, I don't seem to be able to pass this to
> GParted's live CD.

You're not doing anything wrong, rather the installer is somewhat 
limited in the way it calls on GParted. My advice is to first 
*manually* take care of the desired partitioning with cfdisk, 
including formatting the new partitions with mkfs (or mkswap),
before starting the installer. You can do this while booted with
the Dapper liveCD, or a Knoppix liveCD (always nice to have lying 
around). Afterwards, start the installer and choose manual editing 
of the partition table (but don't change anything), then assign 
the mount points to the new partitions AND check the format boxes.
(Yes, do it again, or the installer may quit.) From then on there 
should be no further install problems.

Let us know how it went.