compacting an Ubuntu partition

[Pritam Baral]

On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 8:04 PM, Karl Auer <kauer at biplane.com.au> wrote:

> Hi all.
>
> I have an 80GB HDD with about 5GB used. There used to be more like 75GB
> in use, but I have moved most of that to another disk. Now I want to
> virtualise the HDD. The HDD contains a bootable Linux system, all in one
> partition (except swap, of course).
>
> Virtualising 75GB of unused space is a waste of time and disk space, so
> I want to compact the HDD down to around 10GB, and virtualise that.
>
> gparted looks like it will do the job, but after reading the manual and
> various help pages it is still not clear to me whether gparted will
> preserve and compact the data on the HDD as part of the resizing
> operation.
>
> Can I use gparted in this way? Will it preserve the 5GB of data as it
> resizes the partition?
>

Yes, gparted preserves the data when it resizes the partition.

But I would reccommend doing it small steps of 20~30gb. In my experience,
gparted takes an awful lot of time (read: hangs) to resize large segments;
but works perfectly for 20~30gb.

Regards,
Chhatoi Pritam Baral
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/attachments/20110608/ffb9df0e/attachment.html>