Hey guys,

I found a site in someone's signature, explaining how to resize current Fat32 partitions. I had a question; if you never defragmented the partition, will resizing it erase data?

As far as I know it's held possible, and the preferred way is to first defragment, then resize. It may or may not do it, according to the people who "know something more about it" and write about it on the web.

I've done it a few times, being lazy, resizing a FAT32 partition with data inside, and have not had any problems or lost data (yet, at least). This may be because of the partitions I've played with have never been even nearly full, so it's probable that the resized area didn't contain any information even though I didn't defragment. I don't know if resizing bigger poses any trouble, but shrinking might; if you have any data you consider important (i.e. are not ready to delete because I ask you to), first defragment, then think of resizing. And backup, no matter how sure you were.

Strictly speaking, altering the partition does nothing to the filesystem installed in that partition.
However if you are shrinking the partition and they don't agree, it's certainly possible (at least some of) your data could be exposed.

If you use gparted, you can resize your FAT partition without data loss (BUT! Always backup. Always! There is no such thing as safe playing with partitions!)

Thanks guys.

There's nothing too valuable here that I can't rebuild, and when I'm going to resize I should have a copy of Puppy, so I have access to important apps if I need them. There's just some HTML, PHP, and image files I have for a site I'm working on, and a few projects I still haven't handed in. The rest I don't care about. Fortunately I got an MP3 player as a gift, and there's enough room there to store most of my valuable files.

How long would it take to defragment around 6GB of data, though? I'm not sure if it's all fragmented (Windows is like 3GB, and should be fine) as I haven't done a defragmentation in a while.

Speed of defragmentation depends on your hard drive's speed. If it's new hard drive, you'll be probably done in a half of hour, even less.