GParted error while copying and pasting

LinuxNewman · 11-20-2009, 12:24 AM

Hi Friends,
I am in need of your help again. I was trying to take the backup of an Extended Partition in my pen drive using GParted. I used the following guide to do this:

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/larry/move/move.htm

But When I pasted in the unused space of my pendrive, it told that "the Destination is smaller in size than the source". My pendrive is of 4 GB and I created an unused space of 1 GB for taking the backup of that Extended Partition which is only 533 MB.

How is it possible that my destination is smaller than the source? Please tell what is wrong in this.

ehawk · 11-20-2009, 02:11 PM

I am not sure what the problem is, but you can also do this using a knoppix CD:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/li...tml?ca=dnt-442

Perhaps you won't encounter the same problem, or you will get more information to figure out what is the problem.

Didier Spaier · 11-20-2009, 03:00 PM

GParted is not a backup tool anyway.

I suggest you use rsync instead.

Read the manual (man rsync) and come back if you need more information.

And, you can read these articles, among many others:
http://www.sanitarium.net/golug/rsync_backups.html
http://www.linux.com/news/enterprise...ert-with-rsync

archtoad6 · 11-30-2009, 05:33 AM

I think you should rephrase that to "GParted is not primarily a backup tool anyway."

It really depends on what you're backing up & what you mean by "back up". I don't think rsync is going to operate very well on "Winders" partitions, whereas I expect GParted would do just fine. While I prefer Clonezilla, GParted certainly has a nicer interface; it just doesn't have the features (compression & image files, amongst others).

Didier Spaier · 11-30-2009, 06:15 AM

I don't get your point here.

AFAIK rsync works well with any filesystem, including of course remote ones.

The only problem I can think of is the lack of metadata support on some target file systems, which obviously prevent to preserve it -- FAT32 come to mind.

But this is not at all an rsync problem.

May be I am wrong so could you please explain your statement "I don't think rsync is going to operate very well on "Winders" partitions", possibly giving examples ?

Thanks in advance.

archtoad6 · 11-30-2009, 07:02 AM

LinuxNewman,

This is your thread, is your original Q answered?

If not we should take this developing off-topic discussion to a new thread.

LinuxNewman · 12-01-2009, 01:07 AM

Hi !
I thank you all for giving your solutions. I came to know about some new tools mentioned here, although I understand only a little about the technical problems you are discussing. My problem was solved using GParted, but I am happy to learn about better softwares mentioned in this thread. I shall use them in future. Thank you all once again

itsbrad212 · 12-01-2009, 01:34 AM

I use gparted all the time and I always get an error. ALWAYS. but it seemed to work fine for me, so i disregard the errors