Changing the size of an extended partition
How do I chnage the size of an extended partition in DD ? DD lists primary partitions and logical partitions but I see no way to access an extended partition itself as opposed to the logical partitions within it.
I have Acronis Disk Director 10.0 Upgrade on Windows XP SP3.
I have one drive (the active one) with the following partitions:
EXT3 Pri .996 GB
NTFS PRI 66 GB
EXT3 Log 20GB
EXT3 Log 46GB
EXT3 Log 10GB
Swap Log 6.006GB
I want to copy these to a new, larger (300GB) disk drive, not proportionally.
When I select a partition to copy onto the new drive, I get a Copy Partition dialog that says "Please specify the size and the location for the copy of the selected partition. Select the unallocated space to copy the selected partition."
I select the second hard drive. A red line shows up at the bottom of the 298.1 GB Unallocated drive. "Next" is grayed out, and there is no way to choose the size of the destination partition.
Steve: Try pointing to the unallocated space on the second hard drive as in this example. Here I am copying the first logical partition D: to the unallocated space:
You should then see a resize screen that will let you change the size of the destination of the copy:
I have tried that. Where your example show a minimum and maximum size, mine shows only a maximum size that's the same as the partition on the old drive. It shows 160GB in the unallocated space before or after the proposed new partition. I am unable to change the size of the new partition, either by dragging an edge of the picture or by typing in the Partition Size field. (Actually, I can type a new number in the field, but, as soon as I hit Tab, the size reverts back to the size of the original paritition.
Steve:
Which partition does this occur on? If an ext3 partition, what inode size is in use? Disk Director currently does not support inode-256, which is used by some of the recent Linux distros. Or, it could be that there are errors on either the source partition or on the destination disk. Disk Director will refuse to resize a partition that contains errors or bad blocks. If possible, could you post a screen shot from the main Disk Director window that shows the graphic layout of the disks, like this one:
If you have any partitions with errors then you may need to run fsck (on Linux) or chkdsk (on the NTFS partition) first. Do the complete check that remaps bad blocks (chkdsk /r, for example).
I ran fsck on all my ext3 partitions, and found no errors. I cannot resize my ext3 partitions. That is the issue. Acronis allows me to resize my NTFS drive, but not the ext3 partitions.
The attached files show the following:
acronis5.jpg: This shows the 149.1GB drive before attempting to copy it. It also shows the proposed copy to the 298.1GB drive, which is not laid out the way I want it to be. Note that only the C partition was enlarged. None of the other partitions were proposed to be enlarged.
acronis1.jpg: After fixing the C drive enlargement to 100GB, there's an unallocated space of 115GB between C: and E:.
acronis2.jpg: This picture shows the screen when I try to move and resize E:. I can move E: anywhere in the available 115GB unallocated space, but I cannot resize it from 20GB. The screen shows that the Acronis thinks the min and max sizes are 20GB. Note that the Partition Size field is grayed out, disabling resizing.
acronis3.jpg: This shows the same screen as in acronis2.jpg, after I moved E: all the way to the right. The partition still cannot be resized.
acronis4.jpg: After moving E:, I can move F:, but, like E:, I cannot resize that partition!
Steve:
I see the problem. See the little red "C" symbols on your ext3 partitions?
These indicate that either there is a file system error or that Disk Director cannot understand the file system. Since you have run fsck and have found no problems, it probably means that your ext3 partitions have an inode size of 256 bytes, which is common on recent Linux distros. Disk Director can only work with inode sizes of 128 bytes or smaller.
Acronis has promised an update for Disk Director to fix this and to support ext4, which is becoming popular now, but so far they have not released it. In the mean time, here is how you can fix this.
Use Disk Director to move each of your ext3 partitions to their desired final location. Move each partition so that it starts where you want and so that there is unallocated space of the desired amount after each partition. When you have relocated everything, then switch to a partitioning program that can work with inode-256.
Download PartedMagic from here: 
http://partedmagic.com/ Use it to resize each of the ext3 partitions to the desired final size. This should work since PartedMagic supports partitions with inode sizes of 256 bytes.
So...it's almost 3 years since I posted this. Can Disk Director handle ext3 or ext4 yet?