Moving a partition with GParted?

[rpeters83]

I have my drive like this...

[<---- FREE ---->] [NTFS A] [NTFS B]

I want to, somehow, move NTFS B to the beginning of the drive and resize it larger. I want NTFS A to follow B and take up the remainder of the drive. Both are windows installations obviously.

Is this possible with gparted? I see that you can copy partitions, but I'm worried I may screw it up. How can this be done. thanks!

 

[Joe Average]

Not with GParted, nor any partitioning tool, no. Disclaimer: I could be wrong on that, as I don't use GParted, I'm just basing my answer on past experience with it. Things may have changed since then...

Your best solution would be to make an image of the second partition then restore it to the first and resize as necessary (the imaging software can handle all of that).

Honestly, your best solution would actually be installing the OS the right way the first time to that first partition as you may encounter some booting issues by "moving" the secondary one to the first spot as you're hoping.

 

[Langford]

Yes, gparted can do it, but it will take several steps.

1. Instead of using the move function, do a copy-paste of [NTFS B] to the beginning.
2. Delete the original [NTFS B].
3. Move or resize the [NTFS A] partition to the end where you want it.
4. Resize [NTFS B] to fill the remainder of the drive how you wanted.
5. Adjust flags as appropriate.

 

[rpeters83]

if this operation screws up, is it possible to recover doing fixmbr or fixboot? thanks.

 

[Langford]

If gparted encounters a problem, it should halt where it is at and not proceed to the next step, so that it avoids damaging your data.

Depending on how you are configured to boot right now, there is a strong likelihood you will have to redo the boot record no matter what you use to move things around. A move without errors doesn't prevent this.