You can't change it in place, as far as I know. You may be able to do it without finding another Tb drive to copy the data to while you rebuild the filesystem by a round-about method:
- shrink the current filesystem as small as it will go and drop the length of the partition accordingly
- add a second partition in the newly freed space
- mount both, and move as much over to the new partition as you can
- shrink the first partition again, move the new one down the disk and grow it to fill the drive and repeat step 3
- you might need to repeat step 4 once or twice more depending on how full the original filesystem was to start with
You can do all the above manually with fdisk, resize2fs and related tools, or with parted which is available in most distribution's repositories and as a Live CD. gparted it probably the safest option by far unless you are very familiar with the manual tools already.
But major filesystem move/resize operations like these are the sort of thing I always take good backups before starting, because if anything goes wrong you could kill everything on the affected filesystem(s). So if you are healthily paranoid the above does not remove the need to find somewhere to copy the data too while you reformat/rearrange... Though if most of the data is replaceable, by re-downloading music/video content and such, you could backup the most important stuff and take a chance with the rest.
As an alternative to reformatting/rearranging the drive now you could run a small Linux VM (with vmware or vbox), attach the USB drive to that, and have it share the data to the host (Windows) OS via Samba. This is inefficient and less convenient, of course, but may well be efficient enough "for the time being" until you sort or more permanent solution like buying a new drive to reformat and move everything onto and it is certainly safer than massive filesystem operation on data that you do not have backed up. You do not need to allocate much resource to the VM, I'm guessing a server install of Ubuntu or a base install of Debian would happily run such a Samba share in 128Mb of RAM or less and would not need much more than a single Gb of disk space (in fact, it may only take a couple of hundred Mb, if that) on the host machine.
Here's how to reinstall your Factory Image manually as long as the Factory Image partition is intact.
Go here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=696DD665-9F76-4177-A811-39C26D3B3B34&displaylang=en
Download the Windows Automated Installation Kit.
- Burn the WAIK ISO image to a DVD using Roxio, Nero or whatever DVD burning software you have that can burn ISO images.
- Insert the DVD in a computer running Windows 7, Vista or Windows XP SP2 system with KB926044. Install the WAIK.
- Navigate to the
Program Files folder where WAIK was installed. Find the Tools subdirectory. Under it you will see four folders: AMD64, IA64, SERVICING, and X86. Copy these folders to a USB drive. They total less than 100MB, so you can use a 128MB USB flash drive if need be.
- If you have installed Windows 7 on the C:\ drive, then you can simply boot up your system. Locate the file name factory.wim on the Factory Image partition. Make a note of the drive letter and path to that file. On an Inspiron 1720 it is located in
D:\Dell\Image\Factory.wim.
- Go to the command prompt by typing CMD in the Run box. If Windows 7 is not bootable or installed on the C:\ drive you can boot the system with a "live" CD such as Bart's PE or UBCD for Windows and shell to the command prompt. Navigate to the Tools\x86\ folder on your USB flash drive.
Type the following command:
imagex /apply d:\dell\image\factory.wim 1 c:\
Your system should be restored to its original "as-shipped" configuration in about 30-45 minutes.
Note that this restores Dell's Proprietary Master Boot Record so that in the future will be able to access the Factory Image by pressing F8 while booting up.
Best Answer
I am using Ext2FSD which is freeware. Works great for both reading and writing.