Answers to: Resizing with GParted makes (other) Windows 7 partition unusable

Answer by Blender3D

Blender3D — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 15:55:33 -0400

I had a very similar problem resizing partitions. Make sure you DO NOT round to cylinders, it screws up NTFS. When resizing (I used GParted), untick that option for both the Linux and Windows partitions.

Hope this helps!

Answer by psmitty

psmitty — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 13:37:03 -0400

with windows vista and windows seven you must use the shrink feature of the disk management snap in Computer management if you want to shrink or enlarge a windows vista or windows 7 partition.

Answer by Sander Marechal

Sander Marechal — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 21:39:45 -0400

For Windows Vista and Windows 7 I highly recommend using it's built-in partition manager to shrink it's own NTFS partitions. Apparently there are some tiny differences between XP-era NTFS and the NTFS that Vista and Windows 7 use. Only tiny, but enough to cause trouble for gparted. Window's own partition manager is also much faster at shrinking NTFS partitions.

Not a direct response for your problem, but I hope that people who end up here via a search will see this advice.

Answer by Ron

Ron — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 15:44:20 -0400

Honestly, anytime you attempt to expand or shrink a partition, (regardless of it's file system or the OS that uses it), it's a risky gamble. Yes, it may work, and yes, you may never have issues, but the risk is there. Ideally, you should just reformat and create the partitions in the sizes you want and be done with it. I would also recommend NOT using "soft partitions" (aka taking one hard drive and dividing it up). In my opinion and experience, using a whole hard drive (aka "hard partition") is the better of the two methods (soft vs. hard partitioning). It's not like hard drives cost a ton of money these days anyway.

Answer by guerda

guerda — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 12:42:17 -0400

Some questions and hints for problems with GParted.

Have you defragmented your partition (not with the Windows tool)?
Is it a NTFS partition (I assume)?
Did you have a backup as said in the manual of GParted?
Have you decreased the size to a smaller value than the used space on the partition?

Some explanation to my points:

The reduction works only without data loss if you defragment your partition. Otherwise, GParted will remove data blocks being allocated to real files. You don't want to do this, right?
If it isn't a NTFS partition, it's not that easy to resize it. I don't have experiences with resizing FAT/VFAT.
Nuff said.
If you decrease the size to a smaller value than the used space, GParted will "cut" the partition with data loss.

I hope, these hints will help you to solve your problem.