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General Support - gparted livecd 0.3.1 - now with working move/resize!

h2 - 22.09.2006, 23:05 Uhr
Titel: gparted livecd 0.3.1 - now with working move/resize!

I just tried the new gparted livecd, I've run 0.1 and 0.2, but 0.3 is a huge leap in functionality. I just torture tested it, and it's working fantastically.

Test 1: increase size of ext3 partition on external usb drive, from 120 to full 200 gigabytes. Drive contained, and I'm happy to report, still contains, 80 gB of data.

While this took a long time, 6-8 hours in my case, it worked flawlessly.

Test 2: I decided to do this after seeing how well test 1 worked. First, of course, I did a full backup of all the data on the partitions I was resizing.

In this case, /dev/hda2 = swap, 1/2 gig, /dev/hda3 = / - reiserfs, /dev/hda4 = logical parition container, /dev/hda5 = /home - reiserfs

I moved each of those except swap 1/2 gig to the right, expanded /home to fully fit /hda4 logical container after removing and old partition I didn't need anymore, then resized swap to 1 gig.

gparted handled this without any problem at all.

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/news.php for latest on what is new with 0.3

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/features.php for a listing of what it now supports.

Zitat:

It took a bit longer than expected, but finally we decided to release GParted-0.3.
This release includes one of the most exiting features since the first release;
We finally have full move support!! Although it should be considered a bit experimental,
our tests worked out perfectly and we didn't see any errors so far.

Special thanks for this release go to:
JanC, for the initial idea on how to implement moving.
Brother Larry, for the enormous amount of time he put into testing and bughunting.
Please send flowers and cake to these guys ;^)

Ok, have fun, be carefull and report bugs Smilie

Changes:
version 0.3 (2006-09-04)
New Features:
* it is now possible to move the start of filesystems.
* much improved progressfeedback during move and copy
* you can now move and copy ntfs filesystems and still boot windows from them

gparted 0.3 change log

I haven't tested the ntfs resize/move/copy feature, but that's high on my list, since if it works, that means I can create perfect ntfs disk copies without having to use proprietary tools like acronis or partition magic, which means real plug in and restore hard disk backups.

gparted is really good now, even better than it was already. It's too bad it couldn't be squeezed into the livecd, since if it could, the livecd would be able to natively resolve almost all realistic partitioning scenarios. Sadly, qtparted does not appear to be even remotely close to having the functionality of gparted.

UncleDeadley - 23.09.2006, 00:42 Uhr
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Cool! Thanks for sharing. I used the 0.2 version and it was ok, as you said. I *almost* want to go reformat my HDD just to try it out...

DeepDayze - 23.09.2006, 02:45 Uhr
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I second that, UncleDeadley. I'd very much want to be able to dump Ghost and TrueImage. Kudos to the gparted team for this milestone Smilie

Swynndla - 23.09.2006, 03:10 Uhr
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Nice h2.

I'm wondering why people don't use "partimage" to backup and restore ntfs partitions?

gparted does sound really nice though. If it can reliably resize ntfs partitions, it'd be much easier for windows uses to install linux to see how it goes.

DeepDayze - 23.09.2006, 03:14 Uhr
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Anything like that will only help, Swynndla

UncleDeadley - 23.09.2006, 04:29 Uhr
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I gave partimage a shot, but then I couldn't restore the image because I didn't get it exactly the same size as it was before. That did NOT make my day. Maybe I misunderstood their site, but my understanding was that so long as the data from the image would fit on the partition, it should restore just fine. In my case, I had 13GB of data on a 20GB partition, made image, and tried to restore image to 15GB partition -> No go. Any way, I don't see the "make an image and restore an image" route being useful if somebody has to change the size of their partitions.

DeepDayze - 23.09.2006, 05:28 Uhr
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I'd want to be able to restore an image onto practically any sized partition I choose...and let the OS perform the partition fixups after the restore

eeka1234 - 23.09.2006, 09:50 Uhr
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UncleDeadley hat folgendes geschrieben::

You didn't mention what file system was on the partition.
But for example, for NTFS, you should do a ntfsresize to contract the file system before you save the image. Then after you restore the image to another partition, you should use ntfsresize again, but this time to expand the file system to take up the full size of the partition.

Swynndla - 23.09.2006, 11:09 Uhr
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I see that ntfsresize is part of the ntfsprogs tools (in the repos). Also in that app is ntfsclone:
http://man.linux-ntfs.org/
... might be useful for backing up and restoring ntfs?

I also see that ntfsprogs has ntfsundelete ... very handy (although I haven't tried it).

UncleDeadley - 23.09.2006, 16:46 Uhr
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eeka1234 hat folgendes geschrieben::

Oh, I should have mentioned that it was a couple months back when I tried this, and it was infact, an ntfs partition. This information you provide is useful. It certainly wasn't provided with gparted back when I tried it. Sounds like it could have saved me many hours Smilie

Thanks for sharing!

DeepDayze - 23.09.2006, 23:36 Uhr
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NTFS partitions are tricky to work with...M$ does have some docs on the NTFS file format, but a *LOT* is undocumented. I surely would hope M$ would be a bit more open on the NTFS filesystem, so better tools can be created to manage NTFS partitions.

chris_b - 24.09.2006, 20:54 Uhr
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Though I use partimage for pre-dist-upgrade saving/restore to the same partition if it goes wrong, I've used mondo in the past for backup/restore when I wanted to change partition sizes (as in moving to a bigger hdd). It doesn't work like gparted, but on restore treats the hdd as cold iron and formats it either as it was, or with new partitions in the same proportion as before, or as you want. See

http://www.mondorescue.org/

Chris

h2 - 24.09.2006, 21:17 Uhr
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For backups on linux type systems, rdiff-backup does the job really well.

I just created a script that runs all parts of the backup, with exclude stuff and all that, then I backup to an external partition or drive. If problems, I simply reformat the root partition, to avoid potential issues I've had in the past, then, using the livecd, I restore my backed up root directory to the cleaned and blank partition, then reboot, it takes roughly 10 minutes or so to restore. Easy, and irrelevant about partition size since it's just the actual data that gets restored.

But it does require scripting it a bit to make it more useable, rdiff-backup alone requires too much typing to run without using a script, especially for creating what it calls exclude-globbing-filelists, which is the easiest way long term to handle stuff that shouldn't be backed up. It also excludes certain system files that only exist when system/services are running, you don't want those backed up.

One of these days I'll put together a user friendly version of the script I use, but currently it's too specific to my needs to do much good for other users, although I'm working on it.

This, by the way, is yet another reason why you should always use a separate /home partition, always. Your / does not change that much week to week, but your /home data changes constantly, every time you do anything at all as normal user it changes, so if you backup partition with home once a week, your /home will be out of date almost always, whereas if you separate them, /home stays the same, and / gets restored, which is exactly what you want.

I remember, a few years ago, I never saw a linux distro that even let you install /home into / by default, but unfortunately windows influence is beginning to creep in, slowly but surely. This has been a bad windows habit for years, to me one good thing for new linux users to learn is how to start breaking bad habits, and this is a great place to start. Especially nice to see would be warnings, like: you appear to be giving / the entire 250 gB of your drive, are you sure you want to do this? etc

UncleDeadley - 25.09.2006, 03:23 Uhr
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h2 hat folgendes geschrieben::

This, by the way, is yet another reason why you should always use a separate /home partition, always. Your / does not change that much week to week, but your /home data changes constantly, every time you do anything at all as normal user it changes, so if you backup partition with home once a week, your /home will be out of date almost always, whereas if you separate them, /home stays the same, and / gets restored, which is exactly what you want.

Yep. I remember when I was first setting up Libranet, all the help files I found on the 'net mentioned that you could make /home a separate partition, but none of them strongly advised it and certainly didn't say why it would be advantageous to do so. Would have been nice to get it right from the start.

h2 - 25.09.2006, 20:45 Uhr
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Oh, have to make one correction, I didn't realize it, but the new 2006-1 uses gparted, not qtparted, so that's included now. Good move, qtparted has caused nothing but problems for too long.

UncleDeadley - 25.09.2006, 21:26 Uhr
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EXCELLENT! Now I don't need two CD's in my bag- just one beautiful Kanotix disc Smilie

OH yeah.

h2 - 25.09.2006, 22:20 Uhr
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well, wait and see, 2006-1-rc3 only has version 0.2.5 of gparted, I just checked. That does not support this feature.

Personally, I prefer to use the gparted livecd, it's cleaner, more reliable, and more intuitive than having to fully boot into kanotix livecd.

Plus the kanotix livecd will be frozen, probably I assume on 0.3.1 for a while, while new gparted livecds will come out routinely, so you can always grab the latest and greatest.

But it is very good news that gparted is on kanotix 2006-1, that's going to solve many partitioning headaches, and, if kano and team can get 0.3.1 on the final stable, that's going to be fantastic for new users, since resizing ntfs may now be much safer than before. But backup first, this needs to be confirmed safe by many different users before I would recommend ntfs resize to new users who want to shrink their xp stuff down.

DeepDayze - 26.09.2006, 03:41 Uhr
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I submitted bugreport to maintainer to include the new 0.3.1 release in debian:

Bug#389510 in Debian Bugtracker. Comments welcome Smilie

devil - 26.09.2006, 06:32 Uhr
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we also mailed the gparted and debian maintainers to be able to get gparted 0.3.1 for coming release, to no avail so far.

greetz
devil

arlekin - 26.09.2006, 06:38 Uhr
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UncleDeadley hat folgendes geschrieben::

I gave partimage a shot, but then I couldn't restore the image because I didn't get it exactly the same size as it was before.

I second that, having tried to backup and restore an ordinary EXT3 partition Traurig

that's why I "replaced" partimage with dd and tar ...

Mike Shepard - 26.09.2006, 06:50 Uhr
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I too am happy to see gparted now included by default with kanotix, I never was a big fan of qtparted. As for partimage, I am really happy with that program. It's simple and works great, I've never had a problem with it, backups and restores all work fine. I recommended to a friend to use on his ntfs partion and it worked great for him also. It works great to use over a network. Thought I'd put in my opion on it. Smilie

Cheers,
Mike

UncleDeadley - 26.09.2006, 23:33 Uhr
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Mike Shepard hat folgendes geschrieben::

It works great to use over a network.

Really? I couldn't make that happen either....

Mike Shepard - 27.09.2006, 12:22 Uhr
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UncleDeadley hat folgendes geschrieben::

Mike Shepard hat folgendes geschrieben::

It works great to use over a network.

Really? I couldn't make that happen either....

Ya, I do it all the time. I just do a smb mount to a shared drive on another computer and then tell partimage to create the image there. Works great and pretty fast too Sehr glücklich

Cheers,
Mike

UncleDeadley - 27.09.2006, 19:19 Uhr
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Aww, that's EXACTLY what I was trying to do. Maybe the problem was that I didn't mount the samba drive right. I'll bet that was it. Could you tell me how to mount a samba drive?

ockham23 - 27.09.2006, 19:56 Uhr
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You can do it either manually using the "mount" command or let Linneighborhood do the job for you, Kicker --> Debian --> Apps --> Net.

dedot - 28.09.2006, 18:52 Uhr
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is gparted better than mandriva diskdrake?

slam - 28.09.2006, 19:12 Uhr
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dedot hat folgendes geschrieben::

is gparted better than mandriva diskdrake?

)) Question of the day - my vote for it!
Greetings,
Chris

ockham23 - 28.09.2006, 21:50 Uhr
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Zitat:

GParted is an industrial-strength package for creating, destroying, resizing, moving, checking and copying partitions, and the filesystems on them.

It has "industrial strength". Nobody can beat that. Winken

Mike Shepard - 29.09.2006, 06:08 Uhr
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UncleDeadley hat folgendes geschrieben::

Aww, that's EXACTLY what I was trying to do. Maybe the problem was that I didn't mount the samba drive right. I'll bet that was it. Could you tell me how to mount a samba drive?

I used to use linneighborhood to mount it but now I find it easier just to mount it by hand. I just use

Code:

mount -t smbfs -o username=Mike,fmask=777,dmask=777 //ip of server/shared drive /home/Mike/mnt/share

Then I just tell partimage to put the image in the /home/Mike/mnt/share/image.partimg.gz and it works fine. I've copied images to shares on windows and linux computers with no problem, and had it make images of ntfs and restore fine also. Hope this helps Smilie

Cheers,
Mike

UncleDeadley - 29.09.2006, 06:25 Uhr
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Thanks Mike and Ockham Smilie