Hard drive partition editing

[Krominicon]

This is hard for me to describe so bear with me here.

 

[Krominicon]

sorry, I pressed a button by accident. 

I need to shorten a partition and duplicate it to another hard drive without losing any data.

[Guest]

Just now, Krominicon said:

sorry, I pressed a button by accident. 

I need to shorten a partition and duplicate it to another hard drive without losing any data.

Copy paste the content to another hard drive then use disk management to shrink the partition

[Krominicon]

1 minute ago, deXxterlab97 said:

Copy paste the content to another hard drive then use disk management to shrink the partition

It's holding a linux OS, it's not particularly small. 

[lx_srs]

1 minute ago, Krominicon said:

It's holding a linux OS, it's not particularly small. 

Use GParted. Should be included with your distro.

[Krominicon]

i should probably have explained more. The hard drive is in a server, I need to duplicate the hard drive so that I can put it on two different ones for a RAID 1 setup. I just need to know that if I shorten the partition and it's not taking up all of the partition, I can duplicate that shortened partition to a different hard drive.

[LyyK]

Are you using LVM? If not, the only way to "resize" a partition is to delete it and create a new one of the size you want. Of course, as @deXxterlab97 said, copy the content of the drive to other storage beforehand.

[lx_srs]

4 minutes ago, LyyK said:

Are you using LVM? If not, the only way to "resize" a partition is to delete it and create a new one of the size you want. Of course, as @deXxterlab97 said, copy the content of the drive to other storage beforehand.

that is true.

[Krominicon]

now i think i've confused myself. and i'm explaining something wrong. So, just to clarify, you can't resize a partition without deleting everything in the partition?

[LyyK]

5 minutes ago, Krominicon said:

now i think i've confused myself. and i'm explaining something wrong. So, just to clarify, you can't resize a partition without deleting everything in the partition?

That depends. Are you using logical volumes?

[Krominicon]

Just now, LyyK said:

That depends. Are you using logical volumes?

and now i'm lost. I'm not sure what a logical volume is. 

[LyyK]

2 minutes ago, Krominicon said:

and now i'm lost. I'm not sure what a logical volume is. 

How about this, run

fdisk -l

(lowercase L for "list") and reply with the output.

[samiscool51]

be careful editing disk partitions, you can unknowingly corrupted the drive to a point where even people like werecoverdata.com can't fix it

so long as you don't access it on a bit level you should be fine.

[Krominicon]

Last night I got side tracked and forgot about this thread. But I looked at the partition sizes, and I should be able to just run a duplication software that I have, without editing the partitions. 

[Kiani]

Use BootCD of any partition tool to boot from USB in a separate live environment. I like MiniTool Partition.