Shrinking a FAT32 partition on USB drive

[Cody Smith]

On 03/22/2013 10:24 PM, Basil Chupin wrote:
> On 23/03/13 15:47, Jerry Lapham wrote:
>> I have a 160GB external USB drive for back up.  It has the single FAT32
>> partition it came with.  I'd like to shrink it to a 100GB so I can
>> Clonezilla
>> a couple of 20GB  partitions from an old laptop onto it.
>>
>> Using KDE Partition Manager I get the following after about 15 seconds:
> [pruned]
>
> I won't quote your full post but I have these comments and question(s):
>
> To begin with, if you want to shrink a partition formatted in a
> Windows file system you first need to DEFRAGMENT that partition -
> which, in your case, is the whole 160GB HDD. And the only way you are
> going to do this is to boot into Windows and do a defrag of the
> partition. Then you can go about shrinking it using, say, Gparted -- I
> didn't know that KDE Partition Manager could do this, but then it is
> based on Gparted. Anyway....
>
> You then go on to say that you had did "starting KDE Partition Manager
> and running Check and repair, I still get...".
>
> Once again, I wasn't aware that one could do this check and repair
> unless you were using a Windows OS where you would run "chkdsk X: /f"
> (where X was the drive letter to check and repair the Windows file
> system). So, is the KDE Partition Manager capable of doing this
> Windows procedure of checking and repairing a Windows file system (in
> your case FAT32)?
>
> A reason why I am asking this is because I have long understood that
> the suggestion made by many others over the years of 'when dealing
> with Windows stuff use Windows stuff to do whatever you want done to a
> Windows file system; and use Linux for Linux file systems'.
>
>
> (Just as a 'follow-up', so to speak :-) , I am in the process of doing
> something like what you are doing: I have a 2TB external HDD formatted
> in ntfs but need to have at least 1TB formatted in ext4. I have
> defragmented the HDD and am about to use GParted to shrink the
> available space to make 1TB, or more, available to be formatted in
> ext4. But I used Windows to first chkdsk the HDD and then used the
> Windows defrag to defrag the HDD. And now Gparted will hopefully do
> the rest :-) .)
>
> BC
>
The reason people say to manage Windows filesystems in Windows is
because Linux can't actually fix most filesystem errors in NTFS and FAT,
even though the repair tools "supposedly" exist, that has to be done
with Windows chkdsk. Linux can resize and delete partitions, just not
fix them. that's a current weak area in Linux.

--c_smith