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Why I cannot resize my fat32 partition?
(lemmy.kde.social)
Hello! I have a 215Gb fat32 partition on my external SSD, and a 100Gb unallocated space right next to it, and I's like to extend it to 315Gb. So, on KDE partition manager, I right-click on the fat32 partition, select "resize/move", and this is the windows that pops up:
as you can see, the textbox with the size is grayed out, so I can only move the partition, but not resize it. Why? the device is not mounted of course, and I can operate on other partitions without problems.
thanks in advance!
I don’t think you can extend a partition at the beginning, only the end of the partition. This is because the partition header and table is written at the beginning of the partition (i.e. the file system needs to know where to start reading so that it can traverse files and directories in the partition). To support resizing a partition at the beginning data would have to be moved to the new beginning of the partition, and exactly which data needs to be copied differs from file system to file system so it’s not something supported by a partition manager such as KDE partition manager. Therefore, the only way to do what you want is to backup the partition, delete it, and create a new partition at the beginning of the drive and the restore the contents of the partition.
Extending a partition at the end is much simpler, basically some header just gets updated and says this is the new end of the partition, and then a file system specific command lets the files system know that you now have all of this free space available for use.
I'm hoping not to be forced to format it... but why isn't it making me extend the partition at the end, using the 4.01Mb unallocated space?
Depending on the block size the filesystem may not be able to use that 4.01Mb of unallocated space. There’s always wasted space with any file system because they have to make a trade off between making use of the available space and fast access.
thanks for the reply! I'll try to move it first then