Resizing an NTFS partition........

[Chanchao]

On Mon, 2006-05-01 at 11:22 +0100, Sean Hammond wrote:

> This is interesting. Personally, I've found that the graphical
> partition tool on Dapper Live (I believe it's just GParted embedded in
> the the Espresso installer) works very badly indeed. It almost always
> gives me an error to the effect of "One of the partitions you tried to
> edit was mounted, so changes could not be applied" even though I never
> mount the partitions, or any partition on the same device. Once or
> twice it turns out the changes were in fact successfully applied
> despite this error message, but usually nothing applies. Fortunately
> it never damages anything just fails to apply the requestred changes.

I noticed the same when run from the installer. The best way to go about
it is to run the Gnome Partition Editor FIRST (separately) from the
Administration menu to make the necessary changes, make sure you leave
at least 5-6 Gb (or lots more of course) of free space and THEN run the
installer and just tell it to use available free space. 

Another weird thing about the Gnome Partition Editor that I noticed was
that it (or something else) keeps re-mounting USB flash drives,
sometimes in between operations! Obviously when it remounts, the
operation will fail. I've noticed this problem especially when
partitioning/formatting USB removable drives.  The best way to go about
that one could be to turn off whatever it is that auto-mounts those
things all the time. 

So another thing I do is use GParted only one operation at the time, not
as a batch of sequential operations.

> On the other hand, I've found that the text-mode partition editor on
> the text-install CDs, on all releases of Ubuntu, has never failed on
> the very same machines.
> 
> Seems bizarre to me that others haven't had this experience.

I think it's something in gnome.. Like when running the text based one,
you're most likely not running the GUI at the same time, which seems
over-eager to mount anything it finds all the time, even when
partitioning tools are running. :)

Cheers,
Chanchao