OK, in two of my installations, I have the system disk on E and the data on C. Kind of inconvenient since the other three are the other way. The disk partitions are also the wrong size, so I need to reinstall on C drive and then shrink the C and enlarge the E.
While you can buy Partition Magic for about $40 to do this, that seems kind of a lot for two one-time operations. Here are some freeware alternatives from Linux Rulez
- System Rescue CD. This is a dedicated Linux bootable CD that has partition management on it, a ghost/drive-image utility and various file system tools. Perfect for rescuing and resizing. I tried it on my Shuttle SS-51G. It booted, but wasn’t stable in the graphics mode for qparted unfortunately. Easy to use though. I think this is because I’m using an oddball SiS motherboard graphics controller.
- Knoppix. This bootable Cd runs Linux and has a copy of QTparted on it. This one is stable. Hard as heck to actually get to qparted. You have to figure out a root password (Start/Knoppix/Root sheel), then type passwd and create a root password. Then choose Start/Run as Different User and type in qparted. Main problem is that it doesn’t seem to see my disks.
- Diskdrake. Based on Mandrake Linux distribution, it is a utlity that lets you create, delete, format and resize NTFS partitions in the latest Mandrake release. It is a little strange, but you essentially startup as though you are going to install Mandrake, use the disk partition utility and then escape out of the install.
- Linux-NTFS. This is an open source project that adds NTFS partitions to Linux. They have a utility called ntfsresize to do this. Most of the stuff in the examples is based on this.
- QTparted. This is an open source version of partitioning software. It is also Linux software, so best gotten in a Linux distribution.
