I've recently come back to Linux after several years away. I've been just sort of preoccupied with many other things. I have set-up an Xubuntu desktop on a 1.8 GHz P4 box with a 60 GB HDD and 500 Mb RAM. It took quite some time with research and playing to finally get it set-up the way I want it - samba, file shares, vncserver, and printing. I decided to try to get a handle on disk and partition imaging and cloning for backup purposes and I've made some fair progress, but I've run into something I can't understand and don't know where to go from here with it.

I used Parted Magic 4.10 on a Live CD to shrink the EXT3 partition on the 60 GB drive to a 10 GB partition. I verified that this worked successfully with df -h in a terminal window. Next, I copied disk (60 GB HDD) to disk (13 GB HDD) with EASEUS Disk Copy 2.3 via a USB connection. To test the copy, I removed the 60 GB HDD and replaced it with the 13 GB HDD. It booted normally into the Xubuntu session and appears to be a perfect copy. In a terminal window, df -h reports:
filesystem size used avail use% Mounted on
dev/sda1 9.8G 3.8G 5.6G 41% /

I decided to use Parted Magic 4.10 on a Live CD to grow the partition to use the entire disk (10 GB ==> 13 GB). When I booted the Live CD Parted Magic shows the 13 GB disk as totally unallocated.

Can someone please explain what has happened and how it's possible for an unallocated partition to boot.

Thanks!
BG

Are you saying that the box boots fully to a desktop ? Let's see "sudo fdisk -l"

****@****:~$ sudo fdisk -l

Unable to seek on /dev/sda

Sorry... I didn't answer your question.

Yes, I am using it now.