Resizing NTFS fs

Victor Odhner vodhner at cox.net
Mon Jan 9 21:46:59 MST 2006


I asked:
 > Can Linux dd + parted + other stuff move an XP system to a bigger disk,
 > and then stretch the new partition?

Dale Farnsworth replied:

>Here's how I have done this:
>
>1. While booted on WinXP, check the NTFS FS and shutdown properly.
>
>2. Boot up on a Knoppix CD.
>
>3. dd the contents of the small drive to the large drive (full drive copy).
>
>4. Increase the size of the NTFS partition.  I use cfdisk to delete the
>partition and then recreate it with the new size.
>
>5. Use ntfsresize to grow NTFS to fill the partition.  If you leave off
>the size parameter, ntfsresize expands the fs to fill the partition.
>
>6. Boot WinXP on the new disk, it will auto-check the disk while coming up.
>  
>
First of all Dale, thanks for filling in the subject line for me.  (blush)
And thanks to the others who responded.

Question about #4 and #5:  The way I read this is that the "d" command in
cfdisk will delete the partition and merge it with adjacent free space; then
"n" will make the old partition valid but with a new partition size ... 
but the
NTFS filesystem will still be its original size.  So using ntfsresize 
fixes the
filesystem to fill the partition.  Am I on the right track?

I would first reformat the target disk with XP and look at it with cfdisk
to note the correct geometry and partition size, so that I could get back
to those numbers after the copy operation.

Thanks, wish me luck!

Vic

P.S. -- Jared asked about Windows Media Player.  This guy likes to
listen to Internet radio stations, many of which offer only the Windows
Media Player format.  One of his few pleasures . . .



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