Satya's blog - FAT32 resize

So it finally happened yesterday. Ran out of disk space on Windows XP system drive, mostly due to windows updates and a lack of planning (and disk space) when I first partitioned the drive. C: contains ME, D: contains XP; E, F, and G are more partitions. H and I are CD and DVD drives, J onwards are on the other hard drive. (How did the CD/DVD drives, hdc and hdd, get on H and I? WinXP is crazy.)

So anyway, D was full yesterday, so I moved everything from EFG to J:\edrive, etc. (yes, in their own directories) and copied the vital data files (thankfully in 1 location) to a separate machine (that's part of my regular backup strategy anyway). I also (later, between Knoppix reboots) exported the entire registry so maybe I can edit stuff like filepaths with a regex (search and replace) and re-import select bits of it.

Then I downloaded Knoppix and burned it to CD, booted it. Took a backup of the MBR with dd if=/dev/hda of=/mnt/hdb5/mbr.txt bs=512 count=1 but I'm not sure that that's right, because I didn't have to use it. Saved a partition table list with fdisk -l > file, but didn't have to use that either.

Finally used GNU parted (partition editor) to delete EFG. Then I resized D to start at the same place, and end where G was shown to end earlier. Rebooted, brought everything up perfectly.

Final twist. XP let me keep the same drive letters I had before. (Older things like ME, DOS, etc. used to name the drives by partition order, so I'd have ended up with something like CDEFGH, and I and J for the CD/DVD drives.) Now I had stuff installed on the EFG drives, so WinXP couldn't find it any more since those had disappeared. I did have the same file structure under J:\edrive, so all I had to do was add shortcuts in the Startup group for the command subst e: j:\edrive and so on, and boom everything's back to normal. D: started with 3.76 gigs total, and full; now has about 14 gigs total and 11 free.

Now these are all FAT32 partitions. If they were NTFS, I'd have used ntfsresize on Knoppix. I maybe could have been able to make one logical partition out of 2 or more, I don't know.