GParted won't resize a FAT32 partition.

[Tony Arnold]

Neil,

On Thu, 2006-06-08 at 17:03 +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.

Have you tried using Windows to defragment the FAT32 partition before
resizing it?

Just a thought.

Regards,
Tony.
-- 
Tony Arnold, IT Security Coordinator, University of Manchester,
IT Services Division, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL.
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