[ale] what should I do when resizing ext4 partition

[JD]

On 06/10/2013 02:38 PM, Ron Frazier (ALE) wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I have a machine which dual boots windows and mint.  The 500 gb hdd is mbr with 4 primary partitions, ntfs windows, ext4 mint, linux swap, and ntfs data.  I'm cloning the drive to a 1 tb wd drive with WD Acronis true image.  This will automatically proportionally resize the partitions to the larger size.  I know what to do with windows to make sure it's compatible after I reboot on the new drive.  However, is there anything I should do with mint to make sure it boots properly and doesn't damage the mint os  or other parts of the drive?  As far as I can tell, the swap file will not be changed.  As far as I can tell, the partition order will remain the same, but the boundaries will change.  When I'm done, I'll check it to make sure everything is on 1 MB boundaries, but the WD Acronis program should do that automatically.
> 
> Any help is appreciated.

I'm hardly an expert on Windows re-partitioning, but with the new-fangled HDDs,
you definitely want to use Gparted or parted (not fdisk or similar tools) to
created all the new partitions so they are aligned properly.  With AF drives,
you want to be on 4K boundaries, I think. google will answer better.  OTOH, if
you use gparted or parted, the alignment you "want" happens automatically.

I'd use dd to clone partitions between 2 HDDs. If there is any issue with the
source, then I'd use ddrescue.

I've resized running ext4 partitions using resize2fs.  Don't remember anything
special about using it and haven't had any issues in the years since the
resizing and I've resized about 5 times across different machines.  Of course,
there was space available after the old size partition to expand into.  Use
gparted otherwise - if you need to move partitions around. I keep a gparted
bootable-USB drive ready for just this reason.

IME, Linux is not nearly as picky as Windows about booting.  I've restored
backups to clean HDDs, then ran grub-install to setup the booting slices.
Sometimes I like to have 6-10 bootable partitions on "play" machines.
Boot-repair is a nifty tool that will locate bootable partitions on all
installed drives. It finds Windows partitions too.

Anyway, I hope this helps.