wil I bork the target disk if I do this?

[Dave Stevens]

On Thu, 3 Jun 2021 09:58:52 +0100
Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 2 Jun 2021 at 22:43, Dave Stevens <geek at uniserve.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > I have a spinning disk with software on it that I want to propagate
> > using dd to a flash drive - to do a partition copy. The source
> > partition on sdd below is 29.7 GB, the target partition on sdb is
> > 29GB
> >
> > The source partition has about 8GB free so the interesting content
> > will fit nicely on the target, sdb. I tried to shrink the source
> > partition using gparted but hit a barrier of some kind at 30GB
> > nominal and can't get gparted to take a smaller figure, 28GB say,
> > which would be fine.  
> 
> Can you share a screenshot of what gparted shows for the source disk
> please?
> 
> Colin
> 

the screenshot was shared offlist then

it's fixed although I only approximately know why. There's a thread on
the gparted forum,
http://gparted-forum.surf4.info/viewtopic.php?id=17998

from which I infer that some very large number of inodes from the
relatively large initial partition were blocking the shrink. I expanded
the shrunken partition to 55GB, unmounted, rebooted and then shrinking
worked ok. Not confident I understand why but it works.

Dave