[3943] in Release_7.7_team
Project idea: Windows partition resizing
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Sun Jul 20 00:02:37 2003
Date: Sun, 20 Jul 2003 00:02:34 -0400
Message-Id: <200307200402.h6K42YTG002563@error-messages.mit.edu>
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@MIT.EDU
It appears that there are a couple of free Linux utilities out there
which are capable of resizing Windows partitions:
* parted (http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/) can resize FAT16 and
FAT32 partitions. (It can't necessarily enlarge a FAT16
partition, depending on the cluster size, but it can always shrink
them.)
* ntfsresize (http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html)
can resize NTFS partitions.
Both programs appear to be pretty reliable at this point. At some
point, parted may incorporate the functionality of ntfsresize, but for
now they're separate.
There are a couple of existing graphical front ends, DiskDrake and
QTParted. DiskDrake comes from the Mandrake installer and may be
difficult to separate out (their web page isn't accessible to me right
now, so I can't really tell), while QTParted is still under
development. Still, those may be useful.
Anyway, the project idea is to somehow integrate these tools into our
Linux installer, in order to make it easier to install dual-boot
machines. The integration might take the form of a general front end
similar to QTParted or Partition Magic, or there might be a simpler
interface targetting common cases ("You have this NTFS partition
covering your whole disk; how much of it can we steal?"), or perhaps
the latter with a fallback to the former.
