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Olivier Pons
Asked: 2012-06-21 22:30:11 +0800 CST

How safe is GParted when resizing Linux and Windows partitions?

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I want to resize my partitions: I have 3 partitions:

  • Ubuntu 10.04
  • Windows Seven
  • Ubuntu 11.10

It's booting with the boot installed by the Ubuntu 11.10 version.

I want to expand (only expand) all the 3 partitions.

My HD is 1,8 Tb so it's big and I have no possibility to save before expanding.

So my question is: if you tell me GParted work 99,99 % of the time, I'm willing to take the risk. If you tell me GParted work 90 % of the time, I won't take that risk.

gparted

5 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I personally did not have a problem. I resized my disks using gparted, ntfs and fat32 and ext4. About 8-10 times until now. It should be safe, otherwise you would see problems such as "gparted broke my disk" all around the web.

    The way I see it, it wouldn't be in the ubuntu distribution if it wasn't doing its job 99%. It's a well-established program with a good programmer, well-maintained and supported regularly (by closing/fixing bugs). :)

    Of course, if you are afraid of losing your data, you can always buy or ask from someone to lend you a hard drive, usb or sata, so that you can backup your important data first.

    As mentioned in the comments, use a livecd with gparted (e.g. ubuntu 12.04 livecd), let it do its job and don't interfere. Also, don't do a lot of steps as a batch job (don't put a lot of stuff to do in the gparted queue). Do them one-by-one and hit apply.

    There's only one risky situation, if the power goes down, as per Anwar's comment:

    There is nothing as 99.99% guarantee. Sudden power failure can also cause you a big metal plate, with no uses. Also note that: As per my knowledge, All partitioning tools are dangerous. They always warn their users about that

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  2. My experience with resizing partions in GParted in 100% positive. Some basic rules apply, as has been mentioned above:

    • Make sure you have backup. (That's always a basic rule, not just when you're resizing partions :-)).
    • Make sure your partitions are error free and unmounted cleanly. Specifically, on your dual-boot system, make sure Windows has been shut down correctly before you change anything on your partitions.
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  3. I have partitioned and re-partitioned, edited and re-sized my Hard Drive numerous times with GParted and it has never failed me. As medigeek said there is no such thing as a guarantee in these programs.

    You should always take a back-up of all valuable data to be on the safe side.

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  4. I have used gparted safely on ext[234], fat32 and NTFS partitions. I guess from your question that you don't have any backup of your data, so you have accepted the risk of losing your data if a disk fails, you spill a cup of tea over it etc. In that case the additional risk caused by using gparted feels negligible.

    If you can afford an external hard-drive I'd suggest you back up, not matter if you use gparted or not.

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  5. I've worked on lots of partitions with GParted for many years. 99% of the time this is working, but I also had two bad experiences:

    Once I extended an XFS partition on a virtual SLES12 machine. Everything seemed to work without any error message. Approx. 24 hour later the XFS filesystem completely crashed. I was able to repair it, but did not trust it anymore and copied the files to another disk. Before this expansion the VM worked for many months without any problem. All other VMs on this ESXi machine and on the same 3PAR storage are working as well without problems. To be sure I also did a f3write test on the "defective" virtual disk after the xfsrepair just to be sure that there is no data corruption problem with the storage system. I'm very sure that neither the ESXi hypervisor nor the SAN was responsible for the crash of the FS. Otherwise I would have had lots of other problems on this cluster the following months, which I had not.

    I also do not recommend to extend a windows/ntfs partition with GParted!

    I extended the main partition of my Windows 2012 Server (running Exchange) with GParted. This partition was also the last one on the drive and so the task seemed very simple. I powered it down, extended the disk in ESXi, booted systemrescuecd-6.0.1.iso, and did the extension of the ntfs partition and filesystem with Gparted. Everything seemed to work without error. I could also boot the machine with no problems. BUT when Veeam wanted to do the daily backup afterwards it failed:

    Event description: Job "nameofjob" finished with error. Processing EXCHANGE Error: VSSControl: -2147467259 Backup job failed. Cannot create a shadow copy of the volumes containing writer's data. VSS asynchronous operation is not completed. Operation: [Shadow copies commit]. Code: [0x8004231f].

EXCHANGE - Failed to prepare guest for hot backup. Error: VSSControl: -2147467259 Backup job failed. Cannot create a shadow copy of the volumes containing writer''s data. VSS asynchronous operation is not completed. Operation: [Shadow copies commit]. Code: [0x8004231f].

    I've tried tons of things to repair the VSS writer functionality with no success. So I restored the VM from a backup I did before. Then I did the expansion again with plain Windows Disk Management. This time everything worked fine. Also VSS writers are working flawless.

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