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I dual boot a couple of my machines and whilst I was looking for a way to reapportion the size between two partitions I came across Gparted. It’s a Gnome based GUI for the GNU Parted program for creating, destroying, resizing, checking, and copying partitions, and the file systems on them.

What I really liked is there’s a linux livecd available so all you have to do is burn the disk image stick it in and aside from a few simple commands to boot the cd correctly it loads and starts Gparted.

The main screen looks like this:

You select a drive from the drop down menu in the top right hand corner and the current partitions are displayed with their colour coordinated filesystems. Here my windows partition is first (green) then Gentoo (purple) and finally my swap. Used space appears yellow and free space is white. Select a partition to edit then click on ‘resize / move‘ to see the following dialog:

Its a simple matter of choosing how you want to resize the partitions using the graphical sliders. Once you’ve set up your changes click apply and it’ll go and do all the hard work for you and display its progress as it works.

I used it to repartition space from an ext3 file system with Gentoo on it to a partition with an NTFS file system containing Vista. The whole process took a few hours and I hadn’t defragmented either of the drives or backed up any of my data. I strongly recommend that if you use this utility that you take adequate precautions to backup your data. Or if you’re feeling lucky just roll with it.

As it happens I didn’t lose any thing and Gentoo booted just fine afterwards. Windows, however, was a bit more troublesome. It complained at boot and made me put my installation disk in to ‘repair windows’ which was fine and after a reboot and chkdsk it was fine.

There was a note on the Gparted livecd about not being able to shrink Vista and it sometimes working and sometimes not and a set of instructions for using command line utilities to do the job. I didn’t shrink windows I expanded it but it worked for me.

Have fun