Re: [gentoo-user] Resizing a FAT partition?

[Mick]

On Thursday 30 Jul 2015 20:18:36 Todd Goodman wrote:
> * Meino.Cramer@×××.de <Meino.Cramer@×××.de> [150730 14:32]:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I have a SDcard of this layout:
> > Number  Start   End     Size    Type     File system  Flags
> >
> >  1      4194kB  32.0GB  32.0GB  primary  fat32        lba
> >
> > There are about 11 GByte of data on it.
> >
> > The final result should be a SDcard with two partitions.
> > First a FAT32 with about 20GByte and a second with 10GByte
> > (ext4).
> >
> > I took a look at parted and the resize command, which sounds
> >
> > a little cryptic to me:
> >           resizepart partition end
> >
> >                      Change the end position of partition.  Note that
> >                      this does  not  modify  any filesystem present in
> >                      the partition.
> >
> > One should use resize2f for that purpose.
> >
> > Firstly I want to shrink the first partition and secondly it is a
> > plain FAT32 partition not ext-something. I did not find a
> > "resizefat32" or similiar.
> >
> > What tools do I need?
> > (beside the way to backup the SDcard, reinitialize it, put 2
> > partitions on it and copy back the stuff.)
> >
> > How can I acchieve what I want?
> >
> > Thank you very much in advance for any help!
> >
> > Best regards,
> > Meino
>
> Hi Meino,
>
> The "difficulty" with shrinking partitions is that you need to shrink
> the filesystem in the partition first and then change the partition
> information (which you can then do if you're careful with your favorite
> partition tool.)
>
> There are definitely tools to do this and I'm surprised parted says it
> doesn't touch the filesystem in the partition (but that might have been
> a recent parted change?)
>
> Personally, since you're going to play around with the partitions and
> resizing existing filesystems, you should really have a backup.
>
> If you're going to have a backup then the easiest thing to me is to
> create new partitions and then filesystems and then restore from the
> backup.
>
> However, if you really want to live dangerously, the last gparted boot
> disc image I used could shrink FAT32 filesystems and partitions.  You
> might want to see if it still can do so.
>
> Good luck!
>
> Todd

Don't forget to defrag the filesystem first!  If you were making it larger 
then it wouldn't matter, but if you are shrinking it, then you want your files 
to be contiguous and not sprayed all over the partition.

-- 
Regards,
Mick