gparted + XP

Hey I was wondering what would happen if I used gparted to resize my XP partition? I know that if gparted is used for resizing a Vista partition then a repair must be made to the Vista installation and was wondering if something similar would happen with XP.

Thanks in advance!

 

It works the same way. It simply marks the partition as unclean and forces a scandisk on booting into Windows, which you want to do anyway just in case something goes wonky.

 

Thanks! Do I need to run a repair, or will it just run the scandisk automatically? In Vista I would have to manually repair the partition.

 

You shouldn't need to run a repair, unless something went horribly wrong during the resizing. Windows should boot normally after resizing with gParted. (Normally, though it will want to run scandisk, as mentioned.)

 

When I resized my Vista partition and rebooted it only did a scandisk, I didn't have to repair anything...

 

Make sure you parition is defragged before you start, or the resizing could take hours.

 

That would explain the 9 hour 130GB resize . After resizing are the partitions defragged?

 

They would have to be defragged first.If they aren't, some of your windows data could be deleted.

 

I've never experienced any deletion of data using gParted. gParted seems to do an excellent, although slow, job of moving data when it needs to be moved.

Since the partition is now smaller, it will in turn be less fragmented throughout the disk. However, you shouldn't assume it's now defragmented or optimized. Use your preferred defrag program to clean it up.

For future reference, before resizing a partition, I usually use JKDefrag's feature to force all data together. I've found that makes it less likely that data will need to be moved.

 

You have never had a very "fragged" drive then. The purpose of defragging before repartitioning would be to move things closer together, making more free continuous space. Although gparted would probably never write over a used sector, it could. More than likely, if it didn't defrag, it'd just give you a bunch of random free space. This would result in horribly slow performance.

 

I cannot dispute this point . Even gParted's documentation recommend all data to be backed up prior to using the program. Plainly, because errors could happen. The more operations you are putting into the list of tasks for gparted to complete (such as moving data), the more likely you are to have an error.

I speak only from my personal experience in using gParted many times, that data deletion hasn't occurred. However, as I mentioned in my previous post, I always ensure that my data is all in on place on a disk. Nonetheless, gParted does take care in preventing deletion of data, even on a fragmented disk, so it is still an error when this occurs.