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Anybody know of a free partition resizer?

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  • Anybody know of a free partition resizer?

    So our computer at work was partitioned stupidly.

    This server runs Windows Server 2003, which takes up rather a lot of space; then there's the actual software that runs the pharmacy, which takes up a similar lot. Then there's the database. I don't do SQL, so I know nothing about that end of it. The OS and programs are located on partition C:; the database is on D:. This wouldn't be a problem, except that the sizing is . . . lets avoid insulting terminology and just say it's inappropriate.

    See, they set it up so C: is 10 gig, and D: is 63 gig. (These are actually two identical drives in RAID-1 configuration, but that's transparent to me so I'll pretend it's actually one physical drive with two partitions.) The OS partition has maybe 200 meg left out of that; the database partition is maybe 25% full, if that.

    (There are also two other partitions that as far as I can tell don't do a hell of a whole lot. These are on FOUR physical drives, striped AND mirrored in RAID 1+0 configuration. No idea why they thought they needed that level of redundancy+performance for what is essentially a scratch space to store data until it's dumped to the backup systems, but that's a rant for another time. Who needs RAID 10 for a temp directory? I've hidden my renamed copy of Firefox in there for now, too.)

    So, I need to make C: bigger. Unfortunately, D: starts right after it. Therefore, I need to make D: smaller first. What I'd have used for this would have been Partition Magic 8.0, which I have on my home computers, but it won't install in a server environment.

    Tried AOMEI Partition Assistant (despite their penchant for spamming every help forum that even mentions partitioning), but found that you can only shorten the end of a partition in the free edition. If you want to shorten the beginning, a box pops up saying that'll cost you $160 US before you can do that. No thanks, guys.

    EaseUS states that their Partiton Master free edition won't work on Windows Server either, and the paid version is likewise $159. Again, no thanks.

    Sure, I could backup the D: partition to elsewhere (in fact I already have), blow away the partition, resize C:, recreate D: smaller, and then restore the backup to the new D:, but just thinking about that is giving me weak knees. Any slipup here and I'm taking my entire store down, given that D: is where the main prescription database lives. Especially given that we don't even own this damn machine, it's leased.

    (I've brought this low disk space situation to the vendor's attention before; they go through the directories, empty the recycle bin and the temp directories, delete some older Windows updates and call it good, but I've already done all that and there's just nothing unessential left to delete. We're scheduled for a new server at the end of the year, but until then we're stuck with what we have.)

    So can anyone recommend something similar, that would work on Win2K3 and doesn't cost an arm and a leg? Free, by preference?

  • #2
    A Linux LiveCD with gparted? Ubuntu Desktop should have it. Though, the thing that might make this really an adventure in "Hell with this crap" is the fact that it's a RAID involved. I've not had to deal with Linux and RAID combined, so results may vary. I personally really like Parted Magic for a LiveCD distro, but it's not free.
    But the paint on me is beginning to dry
    And it's not what I wanted to be
    The weight on me
    Is Hanging on to a weary angel - Sister Hazel

    Comment


    • #3
      Can you turn it off? If you're allowed to turn it off I do reccommend Linux with gparted.

      Comment


      • #4
        I can't shut it down during pharmacy hours. After we close, I can reboot the server. The front end (grocery) computers hang off another server that I have nothing to do with, nor do I want it.

        Problems: 1. It does take quite a long time to boot. Although I do hope booting into a live Linux distro will be rather faster.

        2. I don't know if you can boot from a CD on this machine. That being said, if you can, I don't know if the RAID drivers are included on that CD or onboard. This says thatthe RAID drivers are in ROM and OS-independent. I'm still a little nervous about that. Truth to tell, I haven't used linux since the old Slackware days, when each package came as a stack of 1.44meg floppies.

        In any case I'd have to burn a CD at home and come back tomorrow to work on it. Probably try it out at home first, where if I fsck anything up it's only my stuff that gets b0rked.

        Question, if you've used this: Can you shrink a partition starting from the beginning, moving all existing data downward as you go? Because if not, I'm no better off than with the trial software I've got here already.

        Oh wait. I just had another idea. Can you compile gparted under cygwin? Or is that a bad idea.

        Comment


        • #5
          You can resize the partition starting at any side of the partition. It's got handy little grab bars that you can drag. Or, you can specify the size in a text area. If you don't have a CD drive in the server, you might could also do a USB boot from a memory stick. I just had to use it on an SD card I had formatted for my SG4 for use with folder mount. I ended up not using the app, so had to kill the ext4 partition and resize the FAT32 partition to the remaining space. Pretty easy peasy with the GUI.
          But the paint on me is beginning to dry
          And it's not what I wanted to be
          The weight on me
          Is Hanging on to a weary angel - Sister Hazel

          Comment


          • #6
            Can you do the following?

            Shrink partition 2 to a smaller size.

            Add new partition 3.

            Copy partition 2 to partition 3.

            Delete partition 2.

            Increase partition 1 to include former partition 2 space.
            "I don't have to be petty. The Universe does that for me."

            Comment


            • #7
              Quoth Ironclad Alibi View Post
              Can you do the following? (snip)
              You know? That's probably the most elegant solution. Uses software I already have installed. I should have thought of that, but I probably wouldn't have.

              Thinking out loud: C: is 10 gig with 9.8 gig used; D: is 57.75 gig with 15 gig used. If I go your route, I could shrink D: to 16 gig, create J: (next unused letter), copy D: to J:, and then blow away D:. This lets me grow C: to 26 gig, which ought to leave me enough room. That might not leave me enough room for the database, though; if I want only 20, I could make it 20, then expand the new partition backward into what's left.

              Thanks for that idea. I'm gonna let it rattle around in my skull overnight. If it still looks good tomorrow, I think I'll do it.

              Shalom.

              Comment


              • #8
                Quoth Shalom View Post
                You know? That's probably the most elegant solution. Uses software I already have installed. I should have thought of that, but I probably wouldn't have.

                Thinking out loud: C: is 10 gig with 9.8 gig used; D: is 57.75 gig with 15 gig used. If I go your route, I could shrink D: to 16 gig, create J: (next unused letter), copy D: to J:, and then blow away D:. This lets me grow C: to 26 gig, which ought to leave me enough room. That might not leave me enough room for the database, though; if I want only 20, I could make it 20, then expand the new partition backward into what's left.

                Thanks for that idea. I'm gonna let it rattle around in my skull overnight. If it still looks good tomorrow, I think I'll do it.

                Shalom.
                You're welcome. It's always handy to have an engineer in the room.
                "I don't have to be petty. The Universe does that for me."

                Comment


                • #9
                  Well the operation was a success but the patient died. Something went wrong along the way, and now we can't log into or do anything useful on our pharmacy program, which means the store is dead in the water tomorrow morning until we get it fixed.

                  So here's what happened. The partition resize went exactly as planned. It took quite some time, because every change to the partition table required a reboot, but finally everything was done, right about 10:00 PM. This is significant because the tech support apparently closes at 10, although I'd been under the impression they were there until 11.

                  Everything came up beautifully, right until I tried to start the pharmacy application. Then there were a barrage of error messages, the gist of which was, SQL failed to start, so our database (and therefore our pharmacy program) are inaccessible. Not corrupted, but inaccessible.

                  I found out, incidentally, that the database itself lives on E:; what is on D: is the logs. This also turns out to be significant.

                  Seems that there are numerous "users" (accounts) built into the OS besides us humans that sit (or in my case stand) before the keyboards. One of these is the service that runs the database, I forget the actual name of it (I'm posting from home now).

                  Summing up the steps taken: resize D, create J, copy D to J, delete D, resize C into the space thus left, rename J as D. Right? Unfortunately there was one step we left out: find out what accounts have permissions on D. What I eventually realized was that the database account was trying to access D, but didn't have permissions there. I compared D to C and found that one group was missing: "authenticated users". Added that back in with full access rights, rebooted yet again, everything should be good, right? I wish.

                  After much googling of error messages and trying to learn SQL administration whilst standing on one foot, I found out one interesting fact. It seems that if an SQL server can't find its logs, it won't start and will generate an error. But if it also can't find the error logs, (due for example to the permissions on the drive where the logs are stored being wrong), it will never again log in until someone who speaks SQL fluently (i.e. not me) issues it a command telling it to ignore the lack of an error log. (I might have that a bit wrong; this is from memory of something I briefly glanced at on another computer, so I couldn't even cut and paste that command even if I had any idea how to get a CLI going for SQL Executive. I'm lucky I even found the GUI for it. The error screen on my server was full-screen, without even any way to cut&paste it so I can tell the Help desk what it said tomorrow morning, so I was using a browser on another machine.)

                  An interesting sidenote to this is that even if I had remembered about the permissions, I doubt I could have even done anything about it with the setup I've got. The database account logs in before I do, which means that by the time I could have even gotten to where I could have fixed the permissions, it had already tried and failed to log in, setting off the cascade above. I suppose I could have started in Safe Mode (if Win2k3 even has that) to prevent this, but that's water under the bridge by now.

                  So now I have to get hold of the help desk, confess my idiocy to them, and have their database expert remote in and persuade SQL to start running again. This means that instead of starting at 4 in the afternoon as scheduled, I'm going to have to get in there as soon as I can in the morning (complicated by my driving carpool first, assuming I can wake up five hours from now) so that I can get someone at the help desk who can unscrew this thing. Nobody else in the store will even touch the thing: they use it, but they don't know anything about how it works. I do know, but apparently just enough to be dangerous.

                  Meanwhile my boss is pissed off at me, the other pharmacist will be pissed off at me when he finds out about it, and my wife isn't happy either (because I came home at 00:20). I don't think my job is in jeopardy over this.

                  Of course we have backups. Two full up-to-date sets, besides that I copied every single file in the partition to a safe place before I even started. They won't particularly help, though; the database isn't corrupt, I just can't get to it.

                  (One reason the boss is so upset is that the vendor does have a procedure to clear out disk space, or so he thinks. Problem is, like I said in the first post, there's just not much left that can be deleted. They've been having to do that more and more often, last time was last week, and even that didn't free up enough space to let the application do its weekly update. Also the computer has been getting slower and slower, it's taking 20 or 30 seconds for the label to start printing when it used to take a second or two, and I was afraid that if I didn't do something soon, it might not have worked at all in another couple days. I suppose I should have let them run their script and find out that it didn't work, but you know, if you know something's not going to work, and you (think you) know the right way to do it, you do it, right? Sorry if that's a bit incoherent, it's damn late.)

                  Plus if it worked I come out looking the hero. Now I'm the goat.

                  I am so screwed right now.
                  Last edited by Shalom; 05-28-2014, 05:32 AM. Reason: added another paragraph

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                  • #10
                    Might be a little late but I used to use EaseUS partition manager myself. It also has a file recovery system that might help you out. It's not perfect as some files do get written over and lost completely, but it has saved my neck more than once. Don't think it would help your situation though.
                    I AM the evil bastard!
                    A+ Certified IT Technician

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                    • #11
                      So things are fixed now. Thanks be to God.

                      Got in early this morning (not scheduled on until 16:00, remember). The vendor calls me back. The first line tech tried the script they had on file; didn't help. I tried explaining what I did, he says "Lemme stop you right there, if there's a problem with permissions and like that I'm going to have to forward your call to our Systems people. Since your store is down, they have to call back within 60 minutes."

                      So I'm hanging around waiting for the callback. They finally get back to me, I tell them what I did. Point out that there's a backup in place; he says, no problem, we'll just restore from the backup. So they do that, it takes a while, finally the databases are restored, reboot, log in, all is good. We only lost one prescription that I'd typed after the last backup went (it happens hourly), I re-entered that one in the profile and done.

                      I asked him what had happened? His idea was that the index files (on D: ) had gotten out of sync with the database files (on E: ).. I don't know enough about databases to know if that's right or not, so I'll take his word for it, although I can't see how it might have happened from what I did.

                      So then I leave, go pray, have breakfast, come back to the store to grab my bag only to find out that there are still problems. Credit cards aren't going through, and e-scripts aren't coming in. We get back on the phone with the level-2 tech, he reboots again, restarts some services, finds out that just as I was about to log in, the SQL executive applet had grabbed focus, just for a millisecond, and I'd wound up typing my login credentials in there instead of the actual pharmaserv login screen just in that millisecond. It's a bug, he says.

                      In any case, he got things rolling again, 16 e-scripts showed up in the first minute and a half, they're back in business.

                      I'm actually typing this on my laptop sitting in the local library, because I don't feel all that comfortable doing it from work, even if it's on my own time. Boss says he's paying me two hours, which I can't really refuse even though it's my own damned fault this happened.

                      (as an aside, I hate laptop keyboards, I also hate slow-ass network connections. The 2.4GHz connection here is near useless, and my laptop doesn't do 5GHz. I was at least the third person to complain that the wifi isn't working. The library lady points to the one person who has successfully logged in, on the 5GHz network which is on a totally different router, and says "Well if it's working for her, it must be your computer." She told that to two other people as well, before finally realizing that something's actually wrong, but the computer guy isn't in today. Nor will they let me use the library's own computers because my library card is from out of state, despite the computer itself saying I can get a guest pass. She says they don't give out guest passes anymore. I have a sneaking suspicion that if I came in without a yarmulke on I might have gotten a different answer; this library has a documented history of denying services to the nearby Hasidic community where I work.)

                      (ETA: See here. Also, 59 minutes connected, 9,104 packets received. I hate slowass network connections. This is slower than dial-up.)

                      (edit again, so here I am in the Woodbury library now. I got so PO'd by the frustratingly slow network that I hauled my butt into my car and drove six miles up the road to the next library. Unbelievable difference. They wouldn't let me use the library computers either, so meybe it really is a system-wide policy. They really ought to update the homepage that tells you to go to the circulation desk for a pass, if so.)


                      Ah well. At least now I know we won't be running out of disk space for a while.
                      Last edited by Shalom; 05-28-2014, 07:17 PM.

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                      • #12
                        Yeah, SQL Server can be finicky....

                        As for permissions under Windows regardless of version...
                        Moving files within a partition: the files keep their permissions
                        Copying files within a partition: the files inherit the permissions from the folder they are copied into
                        Copying or moving files another partition: the files inherit the permissions from the folder they are copied into

                        Perhaps you can get your boss to spring for some training. If I remember correctly you are the "oh-he-knows-more-than-just-switching-on-a-computer-so-you-are-it" IT-support person in your pharmacy.
                        No trees were killed in the posting of this message.

                        However, a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.

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                        • #13
                          Quoth lordlundar View Post
                          Might be a little late but I used to use EaseUS partition manager
                          Quoth Shalom View Post
                          EaseUS states that their Partiton Master free edition won't work on Windows Server either, and the paid version is likewise $159.
                          Quoth BeeMused View Post
                          you are the "oh-he-knows-a-heck-of-a-lot-more-than-just-switching-on-a-computer-so-you-are-it".
                          After this operation, felt a FTFY was in order.

                          Nice work Shalom. Glad things worked out. As for the two hours - you've freed up all that time wasted trying to delete things on 'C' from now to the end of the year, so probably net gain for the pharm.

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