I have dual boot Win10 and Linux (manjaro), and I want to shrink my NTFS C:\ partition to free up space in my ext4 root partition on the same physical drive.
I keep reading online that NTFS partitioning is best handled by Windows itself. However, Windows cannot partition ext4, so I thought I’d use a live GParted session for the ext4 extending part only.
So why not shrink my C:\ partition IN WINDOWS, obtain my unallocated space, then boot into live GParted, and use the unallocated space to extend my ext4 root.
This, or do everything from GParted in one go? What has the best chance of success?
I could also install GParted on my running Linux distro, and do the extending from there. But I feel like GParted live would somehow be… better?
I don’t think you can shrink an active partition, especially if you’re booted from it. Just use gparted live, it’s fine. I prefer doing all my resizes offline. The only thing I do online is extending.
I shrunk my Win10 partition from within Windows to make space to dual boot into linux so you definitely can shrink an active partition.
I thought so too, but apparently you can. I saw people on youtube do it on their active C partition
Had to do this on Win11, it worked.
@dysprosium @catloaf GParted takes a lot of time doing tasks. Is this normal?
depends heavily on amount of data and cpu speed. I wouldn’t wanna interrupt though
And hdd/ssd speed. Honestly it’s more about the drive speed than the cpu.
Yup. If data has to be moved, that’s one read and one write, in different parts of the disk. That’s going to be slow. (At least they’d be sequential, I think.)
Depends on the task and the hardware. Disk operations can be anywhere between instant and hours.
In some cases, days. When I last retired some drives in my NAS, the task of moving the partitions onto new drives was a 48 hour process.
Like already said, unless you’re sure something has gone wrong, don’t interrupt. As long as it’s still doing its thing, it’ll get there.