GParted won't resize a FAT32 partition.

[Henk Koster]

On Thu, 08 Jun 2006 20:16:18 +0200, Henk Koster wrote:

> 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.

Further to my previous post: after the *manual* partitioning
you should make sure that the new partition table is correctly 
read -- for example by rebooting the Dapper liveCD.