NTFS Shrinking Warning

Development
1

Tonight I tried to shrink my external hard drive’s partition to create a new EXT4 fs and use it for EndeavourOS.
I shrunk the partition using KDE Partition Manager and it gave me a fatal error, driving my harddrive unmountable although the main partition and my data are still thankfully available on some recovery tools.

It was certainly my fault for doing such a risky thing with data that I had no backups of or the fact that I was using KDE PM to deal with NTFS, or the fact that my drive was like 99% full, and there was a really high chance of colliding with some important NTFS data.

But my point is that maybe KDE Partition Manager at the very least should have some sort of warning against such actions, or better yet to provide full support against such issues like Windows Disk Management does, where it scans the sectors for the nearest unmovable file data.

Or even better than that would be to have some sort of advanced sector Copy on Write to make sure that even in case something goes wrong the program could either automatically or manually restore it to the original state as if nothing happened.

This is my suggestion post. And any kind of help regarding my situation would be very much appreciated. I still haven’t done much because I need to grab another hard drive and move my recoverable data from the broken file system at hand.
Using some tools I realized that my creation and modified dates are all corrupted. Is there any way for me to recover those dates?

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i only ever mess with ntfs partitions when using windows tools… certainly for one that contains the windows OS itself.

windows data partitions should be OK to manipulate in linux but honestly, i would just do that from windows too.

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Mhmm, I learnt this the hard way right now.

I just simply had no idea, I’m just dipping my toes in and testing out linux hopefully to use it as a daily driver. But this was a huge blunder that will probably set me back for a while before I can try it again.

I hope they implement some sort of text warning saying that it might corrupt your system.

1 Like
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What can one do without Windows being installed? Is there a Windows equivalent of a live USB, that has the tools required for reducing an NTFS partition?

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yes

https://www.hirensbootcd.org/

it’s a free windows boot live image for utility and troubleshooting, i’ve used it to update my bios on the old machine that doesn’t offer the flash port method.

it’s basically windows for 72hrs at a time.