Gparted gives problems with Fat32

fat32gparted

It seems GParted is giving problems with FAT32 partitions. I am using the latest Gparted Live Disk from their site.

But whenever I try to resize my EFI system Partition which is formatted using Fat32, I get the error-:

"GNU Parted cannot resize this partition to this size. We're working
on"

Now one of the solutions is to install dosfstools alongside Gparted but I don't know how that will be possible in my case since I am using a Live USB of GParted.

Any other tools on linux that can deal with fat32 correctlty. Gparted seems to be able to deal with NTFS correctly.

My current partition layout on my 1 TB HDD is as follows-:

EFI System Partition (100 MB FAT32) 
Unallocated (250 MB)
Windows Drive(199 GB NTFS)
Unallocated (~720 GB)

When I try to increase the size of my EFI partition my trying to merge it with the unallocated 250 MB I get the error that it is not possible.

Best Answer

It would appear that you have encountered the following issue in GParted/libparted:

Bug 649324 - failure to move / resize fat32 partitions less than 256 MB in size

A work-around is listed at the end of the bug report.

Related Solutions

Gparted without GUI / X

The filesystem resize ability was long crufty and unmaintained in parted, which is why it was removed in the 3.0 release several years ago. If you update to the latest parted 3.2, it has a resizepart command that only resizes the partition, and you have to use another filesystem specific utility to resize the filesystem within the partition. In the case of ext[234] that is resize2fs. When expanding the partition you resize the partition first, then the filesystem. When shrinking, you reverse the order, and make sure you leave a little extra room just in case; you can always re-expand the fs after resizing the partition.

Linux – Merge Unallocated Hard Disk Space to Partition

The free space and your existing Linux partition are not contiguous, so you can't simply merge them. Linux's own partition scheme, LVM, allows a filesystem to be split between separate location on the disk or even between disks. But native MBR or GPT partitions have to be a single contiguous area.

Moving the partition in the middle would be complicated because there isn't enough space for a non-overlapping move. Unless you move it to another disk and then back, I recommend switching Linux to use LVM, which has other benefits as well.

The tool blocks (formerly lvmify) by Gabriel can convert an existing partition in place. Run it from a live CD/USB.

blocks to-lvm --vg-name=mint /dev/sda6
lvrename mint sda6 root

This will make your system unbootable, so you need to do one more thing before you reboot. Mount the volume and get ready to run commands in Mint via chroot:

mkdir /media/root
mount /dev/mapper/mint-root /media/root
mount --rbind /proc /media/root/proc
mount --rbind /dev /media/root/dev
mount --rbind /sys /media/root/sys
chroot /media/root

Run update-grub and update-initramfs. Now your system will have the necessary drivers at boot time to boot from LVM.

You can now reboot to your Linux installation and add more space to the LVM volume. Create a partition /dev/sda8 encompassing the space you want to use. If asked for a partition type, select LVM physical volume. Then run the following commands to add the space to your root partition.

pvcreate /dev/sda8
vgextend mint /dev/sda8
lvextend mint/root /dev/sda8
resize2fs /dev/mapper/mint-root

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Gparted without GUI / X

Linux – Merge Unallocated Hard Disk Space to Partition

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