On Thu, 21 Aug 2003, Thierry Vignaud wrote:
> ntfs resize "implementation" (read: "interfacing with ntfsresize") on
> drakx side was quite a lot simpler than writing ntfsresize in the
> first place.
I remember, I was extremely impressed how fast it was integrated. It shows
Mandrake has an excellent development infrastructure and great developers.
There is only one (two) problems, we discussed already at that time.
1) If, for whatever reason, ntfs can not be resized or the potentially
freed space is not enough to install Mandrake then diskdrake warns
"After resizing partition X, all data on this partition will be
lost".
Believe me, some people don't believe this and hope it will work out.
Never. Partition gets resized but not ntfs so they can't boot Win
anymore.
At that time we discussed, this warning must be more explanatory,
like "Non-destructive partition resizing is not possible, if you
continue you will lose all your data" (but in English ;) however
due to the string freeze for translation this couldn't be added
at that time. Hopefully now?
2) Maybe printing the reason, why non-destrcutive partitioning isn't
possible could help in cases. Occasionally these are happening:
- inconsistent NTFS -> user must run chkdsk (not from the gui
but from the command line).
- one of the many different inconsistent NTFS cases turned out to
be a very rare but still valid NTFS and I added support for it
(only in the development tree now)
- NTFS having bad sectors -> I had quite many reports, so I added
support to resize these as well, but it's still in testing phase.
- there are data at the end of the partition -> turning off
pagefile.sys and/or hibernation helped many people, the development
version of ntfsresize can also tell what are those files.
> i still think that relocating files would be nice if it wasn't so hard
> to properly (read: with no risk at all) implement.
Sure, incrementally, very slowly it's progressing, as time allows. I wrote
a list what needs to be done here
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-ntfs-dev&m=105949711324625&w=2
Even non-developers could help a lot, written on the above page how.
Szaka
