ilovemyjoggler wrote:Hello Gegs. Thanks for this. Certainly food for thought in due course, defo not now tho.
gegs wrote:... and it's easy to resize partitions using Gparted.
Hmmm, maybe not where I'm concerned!
It's actually quite easy to use but you can do a lot of damage if you're not careful. There's a pretty in-depth tutorial at
http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/gpar ... TocId17965 but you mainly need to know how to boot from a Live CD or USB and (the MOST important bit) select the correct device to modify. The
Identifying the right device bit of the tutorial will help with that. You select the correct device from the drop-down near the top right of the Gparted interface. Your portable hard drive should be obvious if you've written one of BuZz's distros to it because it will only have a 4gigs on it; the rest of the device will be greyed out because it hasn't been formatted.
You can now re-size the main linux partition by dragging the right arrow slider or selecting the partition and typing the size in the box underneath. I wouldn't touch the swap and boot partitions because I've tried this and the distro refused to boot because it couldn't find the start point of the OS. You can then choose to format the remainder of the disc using one of various filesystems; I chose FAT32.
If you are unhappy with the choices you've made, you can undo them and start again. When everything is as you'd like it, hit the green tick "Apply" button and wait until everything finishes. Do not interrupt the partitioning process or you might end up with a sleek black paperweight rather than a hard drive.
You can download Gparted from
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/
P.S. You can also use Gparted to modify USB distro partitions. For example, you can resize a 4gig partition to fill an entire USB stick (if your stick is bigger than 4gig).
