Questions[gparted](server)

I accidentally deleted my LVM partition inside /dev/md1. The good thing that my linux root partition and swap inside this LVM are still mounted. I was able to copy all data to my backup HDD, and was able to do a dd copy of my LVM root partition.

Now gparted on /dev/md1 shows that all space is unlocated. If I reboot my pc I will loose ability to boot it again. Is there any way to quickly recover partition table without reinstalling system? Keep in mind that LVM still knows the partition table, I am able to read and write to that non-existent partitions.

Thanks

I want turn a physical machine running MS Windows 7 into a VirtualBox virtual machine. This is easy, I have done this before, but this time I needed the virtual size/capacity of the disk to be a fixed and smaller size.

It needs to be fixed because I will install PGP disk encryption on it for compliance reasons. This will expand a dynamic disk to it maximum size.

Aside from this special case there are other reasons for wanting disks to be smaller and fixed. Is my experience. If you run for example a Jenkins build server on a dynamically expanding disk you could see the disk expanding quickly to its maximum size while in the guest OS disk space usage is stable and there is lots of free space.

Using Disk2vhd I have created a vhdx file. This file I converted to vdi format.

vboxmanage clonehd --format VDI MSWIN7.VHDX MSWIN7.vdi

Purportedly with vdi you could decrease virtual size/capacity with commands similar to

vboxmanage modifyhd MSWIN7.vdi --resize 160000

I found that this doesn't work. Even if you try variants you will consistently get error messages like:

Progress state: VBOX_E_NOT_SUPPORTED VBoxManage: error: Resize hard disk operation for this format is not implemented yet!

Below is the disk layout of my vdi disk. I added this to a Ubuntu VM to look at it using Gparted and CloneZilla. Capacity is around 300GB. Unallocated 145GB. Used is around 153GB.

I want to shrink capacity to around 160GB. This should be enough to fit /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdb2.

BTW, I tried CloneZilla but it also does not seem to like to shrink the capacity to a smaller disk. I tried various settings in CloneZilla but no success.

How can I decrease virtual size/capacity?

I am using VMware ESXi vSphere 5.0.0 and mounting a 6TB LUN from my Dell EqualLogic SAN. I am presenting the LUN using RDM (Raw Device Mappings) so as to be able to see all 6 TBs. So far, so good.

Then I use Gparted to create multiple partitions, several of which are over 2TBs in size. I used "gpt" to create the initial partition table. I am able to flag the /boot partition to be bootable. Again, so far, so good.

Next, I boot into CentOS 6.2 64-bit and label each partition as I defined it under the Gparted Live CD. No problem. I ran the install and everything installed just fine. Now... when I reboot, the VM under ESXi says no operating system found.

My question: how to make the bootable partitions discoverable and boot into my CentOS 6.2 install? I tried editing the firmware under ESXi to be EFI rather than BIOS, and then nothing worked.

How do you delete all partitions on a device from the command line on Linux (specifically Ubuntu)? I tried looking at fdisk, but it presents an interactive prompt. I'm looking for a single command, which I can give a device path (e.g. /dev/sda) and it'll delete the ext4, linux-swap, and whatever other partitions it finds. Essentially, this would be the same thing as if I were to open GParted, and manually select and delete all partitions. This seems fairly simple, but unfortunately, I haven't been able to find anything through Google.

I would like to shrink the size of a partition containing an Ubuntu distribution and files. Is it safe to assume that I will not lose or corrupt any of the files as long as I don't make the partition smaller than the amount of data that is currently on it? I am planning to use GParted from the Ubuntu LiveCD.