I am a very new Linux user and have installed Mepis 6 dual boot with xp.

The drive has separate partions for (a)xp; (b)linux; (c)linux swap; and (d)a general purpose linux partition for jpg, mp3 storage. All these are on the same disc drive

Partition (d) was a bit small so I used gparted to enlarge it with unallocated space on the drive.

Having completed the exercise I was confronted with something like, "..job completed with errors, please see details...". Unfortunately the details contained nothing. More importantly I discovered the partition table had been effectively deleted. I wound up reformatting the xp partition and restoring an image, so I could get on with vital things such as banking etc.

(I'm definitely not a computer expert but have like others, picked up bits of knowledge along the way.

Trawling through the web I discovered this (gparted) effect is not entirely an isolated incident. Consequently I'm wondering if any of the gparted developers have addressed this particular very important security issue.

Many people who would "like" to embrace Linux want to do so without either the worry of such events happening, nor the need for extensive technical knowledge of what's taking place under the engine hood so to speak.

For my part, I still don't know what happened.

My apologies if this is not the right place to air such comments but I am passionate enough about Linux and the concept of Open Source Software to want to see both the O.S and the various diagnostic tools etc put firmly into a more user friendly environment.

Unfortunately, afaik there is no repartitioning tool in existence that can resize partitions at no risk. It's not a linux thing, it's a partition tool thing. Windows-based partitioning tools do no better. That's the reason everybody emphasizes backups before resizing partitions.

exactly. there are no guarntees using anything partition-wise. If you still want to give it a go, send an error report to gparted and try again or buy a professional s/w. the only reason they are worth it is they have the money to reimburse you. I reccomena acronis disk director, it has a bootable linux livecd to partition from.

You may want to consider making the fourth partition (Data) a Fat 32 partition that can be seen by both operating systems to share data between them.

Many thanks for the prompt comments. I guess it boils down to getting the partitions sized correctly in the first place, more rather than less.

Backups are the key to minimize chaos.

Your data can still be retrieve if you have not written any data to the drive. I suggest buy a hard drive that is bigger than the present drive. With the new drive, create partition and format it as you would like any drive. Next make an image of the screwed up drive. Finally use forensics on the image to retrieve your data. Music and graphics are little harder to retrieve but will take time.

Data Recovering:
foremost
Magic Rescue


I suggest using "dd if=/dev/hda of=hda.img conv=noerror,notrunc,sync bs=512" to make an image.