Theo Van Dinter <felicity@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Trust me, you want a memmove type operation which works on disks here.
>
> I was thinking of doing something like this on my home box. There's one
> partition which now has free space both in front and behind it that I'd
> like to add to the used partition. The plan goes something like this:
...
> I never got around to actually coding something for it though. Ideally,
> the code would notice if you're moving forward or backward on the disk
> and either work front to back or front to back.
The plan you listed (essentially using "dd" as a "memmove"-like operation
on disks) would work fine, subject to the caveat that you have to be VERY
careful about "extended" partition types. An extended partition puts an
MBR-like block right at the beginning of the extended area, and
partitioning software sometimes feels very free about playing with the
contents of that block.
I actually did something like this recently on my notebook hard drive and
it worked great, in part because I got rid of any extended partitions that
might muck up the result.
On a similar note, PartitionMagic (at least as of 7.0) will *not* work for
this kind of thing, the reason being that it does all of it's copying via
knowing the filesystem format and copying/moving the filesystem contents
that way.
As far as I can tell, you cannot do a "raw" partition copy/move using
PartitionMagic. I'm probably going to send a feature request for them to
do this.
--
Erich Stefan Boleyn <erich@xxxxxxxx> http://www.uruk.org/
"Reality is truly stranger than fiction; Probably why fiction is so popular"
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