Feed Sign in with OpenID OpenID

Simon Willison’s Weblog

Repartitioning with Knoppix

I’ve been long bemoaning the fact that if you want to repartition your hard drive to install Linux as a dual boot with an existing Windows system the most frequently recommended method is to buy a copy of Partion Magic. You would have thought the open source software world would have provided a free alternative by now.

Via Andy Todd, it turns out that they have. GNU Parted is a repartioning tool for Linux. QtParted wraps it in a GUI with a Partition Magic style interface. And the awesome Knoppix comes with QtParted included on the disk. So instead of shelling out for an expensive package that you are unlikely to ever use more than once, you can download and burn a Knoppix CD, boot in to Linux and repartition from there. I’ll be trying this out for real on Monday, and I’ll report back with the results when I do.

As an aside, has anyone ever found a web page that lists all of the software included on the Knoppix CD?

Update: Closer inspection reveals that Parted can’t resize NTFS. Thankfully, ntfsresize can—and ntfsresize is integrated in to QtParted. Magic.

Posted 30th November 2003 at 12:36 am

This is Repartitioning with Knoppix by Simon Willison, posted on 30th November 2003.

View blog reactions

Next: Selectutorial

Previous: Un-happened

17 comments

  1. As an aside, has anyone ever found a web page that lists all of the software included on the Knoppix CD?

    Does this help? Knoppix Features.

    Kayode Okeyode - 30th November 2003 08:56 - #

  2. Fantastic! I was pretty sure there must be something out there that did that, but I had never come across it.

    radiac - 30th November 2003 18:46 - #

  3. dpkg -l should work too

    adam - 1st December 2003 00:39 - #

  4. Will you be installing Knoppix to your hard drive?, if so let us know how that goes. Ive been thinking about plowing under my RH9 distro with knoppix.

    greg - 1st December 2003 05:30 - #

  5. from knoppix : Closed because of "Software-Patents" (...) "In the next few days, the European Parliament will decide about the legalisation and adoption of so-called "software patents" in Europe, which are already used by large companies in other countries to put competitors out of business. This can lead to the termination of many software projects such as KNOPPIX..."

    marc - 1st December 2003 06:37 - #

  6. You can still get through via a different url.

    alan - 1st December 2003 10:13 - #

  7. Yes, Knoppix rocks. Incidentally I used it three days ago to create a FAT32 partition on my new hard drive. (Used CLI to do it, though.) It's not that Windows XP can't format FAT32, it's just that it is limited to 32GB... one of the most stupid things ever, and I mean, ever.

    I also messed with it on my laptop, sweet, it worked very nicely, reading my NTFS, running at the wonderful 1400x1050 res, showing battery status etc. Shame it didn't quite manage to get an IP address, but I did only play for 5mins.

    Swannie - 1st December 2003 20:04 - #

  8. I'll be following your progress with interest, and hoping to follow in your footsteps, once you have smoothed the path. :-)
    TIA

    geodog - 3rd December 2003 10:41 - #

  9. I've successfully created partitions and resized a fat partition on a disk with Knoppix and QtParted.

    There's a list of all the packages in Knoppix here (107k): Packages

    Knoppix continues to consume and amaze me and I'd encourage anyone to give it a go. The Forum and Search are available and useful.

    cgoodier - 3rd December 2003 12:56 - #

  10. Hi, I am trying to install Knoppix from the demo CD but qtparted does not offer a "auto-allocate" feature to fill the newly created blank space with boot/swap, etc. (like mandrake and others do) I am new to Linux and do not know how much space to set aside for each? I am trying to do an install on a 5gb partition of my 30gb hdd. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, Hayden

    Hayden - 23rd March 2004 11:45 - #

  11. I have installed White Hat Knoppix (WHoppix) 2.5 to HD per instructions on whoppix.info forums. Very effective. NOBODY P.S.- If Europe tries to plow Knoppix, etc. under, we will continue to develop it in the States. And we look forward to your residence here. Wilkommen!

    Nobody - 4th December 2004 10:38 - #

  12. I created everything with qtparted (after the initial Windows XP ntfs 30GB partition):- create primary ext3 partition format the above But I get the error message that it cannot format a virtual partition: any ideas?

    Bob Wheldon - 14th December 2004 12:04 - #

  13. Well, QtParted definitely can't move NTFS partitions! Only resizing ist possible if enough unused disk space is available.

    JoergHH - 22nd November 2005 10:59 - #

  14. yea im partitioning with that in less than 5 minutes if i get my hsync and vsync correct again.im going to partition it then when it reboots out in the damn small linux cd and continue from there as it is fast and extremely upgradeable.i like the way it transfroms into debian and you can upgrade to GNU utils and such.its a fantastic distro and i credit the author. Its he only one that works speedily with my 800mhz processor and 64mb sdram.i know that sucks but im goning to try and get both upgraded, motherboard permitting :D

    darren - 26th February 2006 13:54 - #

  15. I have knoppix runnning from cd and don't seem to be able to see my hard drive ---- I unmounted and mounted hda1 hda5 and hdb5. When I open Konsole and qtparted it only see UNIONFS/dev/hdc I need help in resizing ntfs and fat32 ---- I need to decrease size of fat32 and increase size of ntfs. Computer has two hard drives Thanks in advance

    mayoor - 10th June 2006 00:36 - #

  16. Getting Knoppix 5.0.1 did me a favour - my desktop PC can see USB disks with Knoppix 4, but my laptop can't. With 5.0.1, it appears my USB disks do work. (The laptop is an Acer TravelMate C300.) I'd recommend anyone to grab the newer Knoppix. First order of business for me, now... clone the laptop hard disk to a USB external disk. A bootable backup - it's another 2.5" disk.

    It was already pretty good at detecting disks. What disks do you have, that it has a problem with?

    I also had a lot of "fun" downloading the DVD edition of Knoppix. rsync is probably recommended for a reason. I hope I wrote down which FTP or HTTP server actually did support a file larger than 4 gigabytes... some gave me 47 megs, some 4 gig exactly. And then I wanted to copy the file to a FAT32 disk for transfer... you can't! 4 GB limit! So I also hope I wrote down which Windows file splitter /also/ works on files > 4 gigabytes.

    Oh, and I needed to put the ISO on an NTFS partition before I could burn it to DVD. Or alternatively, if I have two DVD drives (and they're cheap enough), then I could put it on one DVD as a file and then burn it to another as an ISO.

    I don't even know what's on the DVD that isn't on the CD, but it's gotta be some cool stuff, right? ;-)

    Robert Carnegie - 27th June 2006 21:35 - #

  17. Try http://www.distrowatch.com/knoppix

    Somebody - 27th August 2006 15:13 - #

Comments are closed.

Previously hosted at http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2003/11/30/repartitioning

A django site