Resize partition did not resize properly

[ubantuwannabe]

Dear all,

I have a 320G hard disk.

Here the original partition:

first partition ntfs windows xp (occupies almost 318G if I din remember wrongly)
second partition fat32 for recovery partition (occupies 2G for recovery options)


I wanted to achieve the following:

first partition ntfs to install windows xp
second partition fat32 for recovery partition
third partition ubuntu 8.10

first I defrag the first partition.

next I resize the partition during the installation of ubuntu 8.10
using the first option guided resize option as shown in http://launchpadlibrarian.net/18301624/screenshot_fail.png.

(Note the above is not my screenshot, but it is to show a clearer picture of what I did)

I did not 'adjust the size' as in adjust the bar, I just choose whatever the disk partitioned suggested:

first partition ntfs 40G
second partition fat32 this is a recovery partition
third partition is supposed to be 280G

but after resizing I discover that the ntfs partition shrinks to 11G and no more free space, why does this happen?



doordie@compaqnc4400:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda5 271G 2.2G 255G 1% /
tmpfs 1.5G 0 1.5G 0% /lib/init/rw
varrun 1.5G 104K 1.5G 1% /var/run
varlock 1.5G 0 1.5G 0% /var/lock
udev 1.5G 2.8M 1.5G 1% /dev
tmpfs 1.5G 104K 1.5G 1% /dev/shm
lrm 1.5G 2.0M 1.5G 1% /lib/modules/2.6.27-7-generic/volatile
doordie@compaqnc4400:~$ sudo fdisk -l
[sudo] password for doordie:

Disk /dev/sda: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x95aa95aa

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 1226 9847813+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 38209 38913 5654848+ c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda3 1227 38208 297057915 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 1227 37077 287973126 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 37078 38208 9084726 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Partition table entries are not in disk order

[p2bc]

Ok, what I would do is separate your procedures.

1) Using the LiveCD, Ubuntu / Knoppix, use GParted to resize to Windows partitions, and move the Fat32 partition. Commit those changes. Stop. reboot you system. Log into Windows, check and see everything is hunky dory.

2) Reboot, and install Ubuntu or the remaining disk space, remember to also make a swap disk. :)

I find breaking things down into smaller step makes recovering something a little easier because it forces you veritfy as you go along. Doing everything in one shot there is no way to track where it went wrong for sure easily.

So I trying resizing your Windows partition to 40g, make sure it works, then re-install Linux

That is my advice

[Mark Phelps]

p2bc: Excellent advice!!

Also, if you do this in two steps, if you hose up your partitions in the first step, you have an excellent chance of recoverying them without data loss. But if you go ahead and do the install and THEN find out your partitions are hose, you've already overwritten then, so the chances of full data recovery are very slim.