GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 649324
failure to move / resize fat32 partitions less than 256 MB in size
Last modified: 2020-11-13 10:41:27 UTC
Created attachment 187153 [details] Gparted screenshots and gparted_details.htm files for fat32 partition move failure Hi, I'm trying to move an existing fat32 partition (in order to align it to 1MB boundary) with Gparted 0.8.0 (run from either GNU/Linux LiveCD or Parted Magic 6.0). It doesn't matter if the partition is originally created with Gparted or Windows; in all cases, the move / resize fails. For a move, the error is: "GNU parted cannot resize this partition to this size. We're working on it!" For a resize (shrink), there's an additional error message: "The filesystem is bigger than its volume!" I've included a series of screenshots (XWD .dmp files) and saved gparted_details.htm file for the case of a fat32 partition move to the right of 8MB (1MB aligned). The files are contained in the attached .zip file. My only work-around for now is to image a fat32 partition, delete it, recreate a new one from scratch (aligned to 1MB boundary), then restore the image. The screen1.dmp file shows a fat32 partition re-created in this manner. Background: Often I need to re-align partitions to 1MB boundaries for SSD drives. Often, laptop manufacturers like HP or Dell install their diagnostics tools in fat32 or fat16 partitions. It would be nice if Gparted would handle moving and resizing fat32 partitions better so that I would no longer need to take the additional steps described above. Please feel free to contact me if you need more details. Many thanks in advance for your help!! Ed
Thank you Ed for your interest in GParted. GParted uses the libparted library from the parted project to resize FAT16 and FAT32 file systems. From my testing, the libparted library is only able to work with FAT16 or FAT32 file systems that are 256 MB or larger. Unfortunately support for resizing FAT16 and FAT32 file systems is being removed from the libparted library. The last version of libparted that does support resizing is the recently released parted-2.4. The announcement regarding removal of FAT16 and FAT32 file system resizing from parted is available at the following link: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-parted/2011-05/msg00010.html The commit that removes the resizing capability can be viewed at the following link: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-parted/2011-05/msg00061.html Hopefully someone will develop a resizing utility to fill this void.
Update title to include size restriction.
*** Bug 707419 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Status Update: libparted 3.0 - removed FAT16/FAT32 and HFS/HFS+ file system resize capability libparted 3.1 - added back FAT16/32 and HFS/HFS+ file system resize capability in a separate library libparted 3.2 - also has this separate resize library The inability to resize FAT16/FAT32 file systems that are less than 256 MB remains. Workaround: Resizing FAT16/FAT32 Partitions (less than 256 MB) --------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Backup the data in the FAT16/FAT32 partition 2. Reformat the partition to EXT4 3. Resize EXT4 partition to desired partition size 4. Reformat the partition back to FAT16/FAT32 5. Restore the FAT16/FAT32 files from backup Note that if you use file system labels you may wish to re-label the partition at this time.
Will given bug be fixed in future since there is a still high need to resize small partitions like efi windows partitions to, say, install clover on it
still not fixed in 0.32.0 under ubuntu 19.04
Unless someone gets a real itch to dig into the inner workings of the FAT file system and the libparted code, this issue with the libparted library is unlikely to be fixed. In the meantime one can use the work-around mentioned in comment #4.
bugzilla.gnome.org is being replaced by gitlab.gnome.org. We are closing all old bug reports and feature requests in GNOME Bugzilla which have not seen updates for a long time. If you still use gparted and if you still see this bug / want this feature in a recent and currently supported version, then please feel free to report it at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gparted/-/issues/ by following the guidelines at https://wiki.gnome.org/Community/GettingInTouch/BugReportingGuidelines Thank you for creating this report and we are sorry it could not be implemented so far (volunteer workforce and time is limited).